William James Quotes
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If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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History is a bath of blood.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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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 minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
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But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
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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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Act the part and you will become the part.
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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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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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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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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
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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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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
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Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
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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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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
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But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
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If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.