William James Quotes
-
You can't out-perform your self-image.
-
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
-
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
-
We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
-
It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
-
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!
-
Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'.
-
There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
-
Truth happens to an idea
-
Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mentalfire.
-
Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
-
Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
-
Effort is a measure of a Man.
-
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
-
Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
-
That which is most personal, is most interesting.
-
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
-
Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
-
We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
-
There is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.
-
If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
-
My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
-
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.
-
The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.