William James Quotes
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Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do
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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 WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.
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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.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
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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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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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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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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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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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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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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
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That which is most personal, is most interesting.
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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
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There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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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 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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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.