William James Quotes
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.
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In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those in a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to a contentless unit, and the years grow hollow and collapse.
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
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You can't out-perform your self-image.
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
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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.
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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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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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
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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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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.
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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
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That which is most personal, is most interesting.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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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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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
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What do believers in the Absolute mean by saving that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is ‘overruled’ already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.