William James Quotes
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
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When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.
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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
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There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
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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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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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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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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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If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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The most violent revolutions in an individuals beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and ones own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.
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The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.