Top 723 Quotes & Sayings by William James - Page 2
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American philosopher William James.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.
If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
To spend life for something which outlasts it.
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
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.
To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.
The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
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.
Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
Man lives for science as well as bread.
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
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 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.
Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
In business for yourself, not by yourself.
Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
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.
What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
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 fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
What holds attention determines action.
To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.
Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do
Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.
There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.
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