William James Quotes
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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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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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If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
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Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
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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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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs
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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
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The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.
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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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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
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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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Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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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 teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
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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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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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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.