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