William James Quotes
Most popular William James Quotes
History is a bath of blood.
Self-esteem = Success divided by Pretensions.
Religion ... is a man's total reaction upon life.
The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
A thing is important if any one think it important.
I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.
The instinct of ownership is fundamental in men's nature.
Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.
Footnotes, the little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
As-if principle: If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Man lives by habits, indeed, but what he lives for is thrills and excitements.
No state of mind once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before.
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
Genius ... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.
The ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates and inspires.
Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
The obstinate insisting that tweedledum is not tweedledee is the bone and marrow of life.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
The world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed.
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that one can alter one's life simply by altering one's attitude of mind.
A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, finally, it becomes what everyone knows.
We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold.
It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.
What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise—although the philosophers generally call it "recognition."
The moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That—with the squalid interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease.
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
Whenever two men meet there are really six men present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other sees him, and each man as he really is.
Man, biologically considered...is simply the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own species.
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease.
The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
In the practical as in the theoretic life, the man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing, whilst his neighbours, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved.
I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: "This is the real me!"
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.
Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens there lie other consciousness'; other forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without ever suspecting their existence but apply the requisite stimulus and in a touch, they are all there in their entirety.... They may determine our attitudes though they fail to furnish formulas. They may open a region though they do not give a map. At any rate, they forbid the premature closing of our accounts with reality.
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
