William James Quotes
-
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.
-
The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
-
In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
-
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.
-
You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
-
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
-
Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.
-
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.
-
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
-
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.
-
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
-
Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
-
To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
-
Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.
-
The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
-
There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
-
An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
-
The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
-
What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand."
-
I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.