William James Quotes
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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
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The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
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Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
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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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It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
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Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
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A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
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The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for to be true means only to perform this marriage-function.
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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
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If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
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Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mentalfire.
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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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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
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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.