William James Quotes
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Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
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The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
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Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
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Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
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If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
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Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'.
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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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We are mere bundles of habits.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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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.
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Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.
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We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
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Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
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In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those in a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to a contentless unit, and the years grow hollow and collapse.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
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A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.