William James Quotes

To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.

Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.

Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections

Choose a self and stand by it.

Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.

Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?

Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.

O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.

We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.

Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.

Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.

Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.

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

We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.

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.

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.

The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.

There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.

Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract

The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.

Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

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.

'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.

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

Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.

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

There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.

To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.

Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.

If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known. If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long.

I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.