William James Quotes
-
The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
-
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.
-
You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
-
Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
-
I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
-
We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
-
No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
-
The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.
-
We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.
-
He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
-
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
-
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.
-
An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
-
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.
-
We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
-
For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
-
No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
-
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.
-
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.
-
With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.