William James Quotes
-
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
-
Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
-
Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
-
A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
-
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
-
If it works, it's true.
-
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
-
Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
-
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
-
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
-
With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
-
... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
-
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.
-
Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
-
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.
-
The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
-
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
-
Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
-
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
-
You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
-
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
-
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.
-
The strenuous life tastes better
-
No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.