William James Quotes

The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

'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 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.

How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?

What holds attention determines action.

The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.

Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess.

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.

The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.

The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.

It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.

Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so may separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this.

We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct.

He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.

It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association

If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.

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

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.

The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.

To change one's life:a. Start immediatelyb. B. Do it flamboyantlyc. No exceptionsNever suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted.

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

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

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

When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.

The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.

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

What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.

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.

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

Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.

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

The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

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.

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

We [may] answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"-in other words, instead of giving the reason for a fact, we give another example of the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason, has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.

Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

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.

If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.

The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.

If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.

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, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.

The war for our Union, with all the constitutional issues which it settled, and all the military lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but one meaning in the eyes of history. It freed the country from the social plague which until then had made political development impossible in the United States. More and more, as the years pass, does the meaning stand forth as the sole meaning.

All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.

Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.

If it works, it's true.

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

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