William James Quotes
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
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Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
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Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess.
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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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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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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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Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
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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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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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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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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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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
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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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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
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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.
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We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not.
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The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
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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.