William James Quotes

“Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”

“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction”

“In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.”

“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.”

“In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.”

“Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.”

“How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.”

“The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”

“Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.”

“A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.”

“Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.”

“The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.”

“There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.”

“Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.”

“To spend life for something which outlasts it.”

“Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.”

“The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”

“To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.”

“Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off.”

“We are mere bundles of habits.”

“(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some 5 or 6 score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale.”

“Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.”

“The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.”

“Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.”

“History is a bath of blood.”