William James Quotes
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Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information.
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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
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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
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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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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.
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
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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.
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The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for to be true means only to perform this marriage-function.
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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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You can't out-perform your self-image.
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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
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We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.
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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
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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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The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
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We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly - the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.