William James Quotes
-
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.
-
In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.
-
Individuality is founded in feeling
-
The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.
-
Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
-
Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
-
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
-
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
-
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
-
Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
-
The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
-
In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
-
In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
-
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
-
The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
-
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.
-
The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
-
Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
-
We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
-
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
-
Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.