William James Quotes
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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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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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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
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Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
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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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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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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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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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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
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A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
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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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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
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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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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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The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life
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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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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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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.