William James Quotes
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
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History is a bath of blood.
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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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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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
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The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.
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Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
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Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
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All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride.
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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.
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Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.