William James Quotes
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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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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
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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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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?
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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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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common
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The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.
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Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors: the individual ... bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
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But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
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If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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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.