William James Quotes

William James Quotes

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.

An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?

the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease

Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.

There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.

The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.

we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood

إن بيننا وبين الله رابطة لا تنفصم، فإذا نحن أخضعنا أنفسنا لإشرافه - سبحانه وتعالى - تحققت %A

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.

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.

Belief creates the actual fact.

Much of what we call evil can often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight

Man flieht nicht, weil man Angst hat, sondern man hat Angst, weil man flieht.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.

To change one's life: Begin now. Be bold. No exceptions.

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.

Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

Psychology is the science of mental life

In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.

No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.

A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.

We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.

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