William James Quotes

A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.

... 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.

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

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

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.

Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience

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

Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!

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

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.

To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. which give happiness. Thomas Jefferson We never enjoy perfect happiness; our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness; some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.

In business for yourself, not by yourself.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

Habit is the great flywheel of society.

Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were, together; the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

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.

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life

The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.

Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.

The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.

The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.

When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.

We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way. If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big.

The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.

The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.

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.

The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.

The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

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.

Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

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.

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.

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.

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!.

Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

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

The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.

Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.

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

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.

A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new.

We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.