William James Quotes
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.
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Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
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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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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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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.
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How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?
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We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
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The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.
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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
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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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Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.
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The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.
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The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.
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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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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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There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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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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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
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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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He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.