William James quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by William James

William James Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from William James on Wise Famous Quotes.

I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.

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

History is a bath of blood.

Work usually follows will.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.

To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides

I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.

our experience is what we attend to

What holds attention determines action.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

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.

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

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

The means have murdered the end.

To spend life for something which outlasts it.

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

Articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion.

The faith state ... is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending-desires to one direction ... [p.272]

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

Truth is what works.

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.

Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.

The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind ... that encounters it.

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.

It's turtles all the way down.

As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.

Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.

Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.

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

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

So I stand here without further deprecatory words.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.

All religions begin with the cry Help.

Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

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

In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.

Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.

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

In business for yourself, not by yourself.

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

Time itself comes in drops.

The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

Truth happens to an idea

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

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

You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.

I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.

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

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

True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.

I will act as if what i do makes a difference.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

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.

With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.

Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.

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

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

Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.

Every claim creates an obligation.

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

Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

Volition ... takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.

To change one's life: Begin now. Be bold. No exceptions.

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

Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience

To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One

No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.

We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.

Contemporary philosophers, even the rationalistic minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.

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

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

Our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.

New habits can be launched.

Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.

Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and opens a region though they fail to give a map.

We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.

There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.

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

Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.

There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.

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

A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.

The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease

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

All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.

We don't laugh because we're happy, we're happy because we laugh.

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

A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.

The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.

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

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