William James Quotes
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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
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A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
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He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
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To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
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We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
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... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.
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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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The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
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With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
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If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole.
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If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
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Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
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Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.
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We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
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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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We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.
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...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling; and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
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If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known. If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long.
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The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing.
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
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Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is All striving is vain, will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.