William James Quotes
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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
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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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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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That which is most personal, is most interesting.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
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The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
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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.
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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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Belief creates the actual fact.
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
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The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
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I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
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Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.
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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
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So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
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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.
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
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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.