William James Quotes
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The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
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Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
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Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
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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?
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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
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Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
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We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
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To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
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Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
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Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
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If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
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I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)
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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.
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How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.
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It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
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The perfection of rottenness.
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
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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 result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation.
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The art of remembering is the art of thinking. When we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall.