William James Quotes
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
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Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
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The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity , with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.
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Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
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Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
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Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.
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Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
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Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
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The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
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Time itself comes in drops.
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
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Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
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Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.
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In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.
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When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.
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Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.
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Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.