William James Quotes
-
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!
-
Act the part and you will become the part.
-
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
-
Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
-
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
-
When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
-
Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.
-
If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
-
Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
-
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.
-
Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
-
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
-
Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
-
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.
-
To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
-
Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
-
O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
-
New habits can be launched.
-
We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
-
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.