Top 723 Quotes & Sayings by William James - Page 3

Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.

The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.

Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.

You can be an artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be good. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.

When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.

Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction

Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.

The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.

Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.

Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.

The strenuous life tastes better

Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.

Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.

To change one's life: a. Start immediately b. B. Do it flamboyantly c. No exceptions Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.

The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.

The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.

It is your friends who make your world.

Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation.

A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.

The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.

Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.

Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.

Act the part and you will become the part.

If you want a confidence, act as if you already have it. Try the "as if" technique.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.

Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.

Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.

When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.

Instinct leads, logic does but follow.

If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.

Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.

If it works, it's true.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.

The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use 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.

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.

The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.

If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.

The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.

A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." "This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it." "Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.

He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.