William James Quotes

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

“As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

“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.”

“The true'to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”

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

“Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?”

“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.”

“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”

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

“The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.”

“Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.”

“Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.”

“Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.”

“No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.”

“We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.”

“Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.”

“It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.”

“A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”

“Truth happens to an idea”

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

“True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.”

“It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.”

“Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”

“Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”

“The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.”