William James Quotes
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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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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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
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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.
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We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.
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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 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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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
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To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
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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 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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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
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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
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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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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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Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
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The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
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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 war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.
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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 one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.