William James Quotes

“Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.”

“Truth is what works.”

“We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.”

“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.”

“Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.”

“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.”

“Effort is a measure of a Man.”

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

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

“Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.”

“An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true”

“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.”

“All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.”

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

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

“The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.”

“The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.”

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

“We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly - the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.”

“Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.”

“The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.”

“Truth is something that happens to an idea.”

“Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.”

“Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.”