William James Quotes
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.
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He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
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To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
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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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To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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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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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
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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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The strenuous life tastes better
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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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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
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We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
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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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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
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If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.
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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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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
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There is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me!"