William James Quotes
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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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 deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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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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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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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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Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.
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The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.
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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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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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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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You can't out-perform your self-image.
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
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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 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 instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
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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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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
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From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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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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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!