William James Quotes
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
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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.
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Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief callfor a God on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
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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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That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
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Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess.
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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
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At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.
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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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That which is most personal, is most interesting.
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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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The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
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Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
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The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
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Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.