William James Quotes
William James Quotes
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
4721 The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.
1615 Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
4140 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.
1522 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.
2635 A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
2371 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.
3257 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?
3632 the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease
4935 Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.
2112 There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.
4051 The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.
3187 we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood
2633 إن بيننا وبين الله رابطة لا تنفصم، فإذا نحن أخضعنا أنفسنا لإشرافه - سبحانه وتعالى - تحققت %A
2854 If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
3091 In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
3419 It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
4434 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.
4939 Belief creates the actual fact.
4743 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
3471 Man flieht nicht, weil man Angst hat, sondern man hat Angst, weil man flieht.
1561 Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
2609 Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
2551 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.
4904 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.
1876 Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
3604 To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.
1062 To change one's life: Begin now. Be bold. No exceptions.
4063 We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
1566 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.
2704 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.
3643 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.
4863 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.
1472 Psychology is the science of mental life
2826 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.
4134 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.
3480 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.
3703 We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.
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