William James Quotes
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A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.
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O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
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Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man.
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The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed
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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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We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.
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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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We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
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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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We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
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What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand."
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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
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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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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
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An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.
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Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.
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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
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Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.