William James Quotes

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

Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.

Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.

'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth

Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

The art of remembering is the art of thinking. When we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall.

Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse

We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

There are 3 rules to follow if you want to change; (1) Start immediately, (2) Do it flamboyantly, (3) No exceptions.

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.

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?

An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number.

Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.

Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes

Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.

On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.

The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.

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

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.

I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.

From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.

Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things.

One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.

I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.

The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it

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.

A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.

The word 'cause' is an altar to an unknown god.

All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.

Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.

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

It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.

We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.

There is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me!"

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

History is a bath of blood.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

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

All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.

From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.

It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.