William James Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
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.
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.
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]
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 baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
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.
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
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.
A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
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.
Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.
Volition ... takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.
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.
Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and opens a region though they fail to give a map.
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.
All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.