William James Quotes
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A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.
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A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new.
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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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The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
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I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
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Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
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There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
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We [may] answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"-in other words, instead of giving the reason for a fact, we give another example of the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason, has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.
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Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
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The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
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Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its string can so often depart and turn into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it.
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To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
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The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
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Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
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The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.
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Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
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Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
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Be patient and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important.
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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.