William James Quotes

If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.

The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.

Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.

Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.

All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.

The education of attention would be an education par excellence

The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.

Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

The perfection of rottenness.

Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.

Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.

To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein

Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.

Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.

Belief creates the actual fact.

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.

'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.

The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.

No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.

a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries

The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.

In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.

So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.

Effort is a measure of a Man.

Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.

... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.

Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.

(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some 5 or 6 score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale.

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.

But when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, whilst others simply cannot. And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper spring of human personality to conduct the task.

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

As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.

The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.

In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.

What holds attention determines action.