William James Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
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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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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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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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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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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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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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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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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.
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[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.
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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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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.
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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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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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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.