William James Quotes
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Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.
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The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.
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The education of attention would be an education par excellence
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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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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
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The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
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It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.
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The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
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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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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
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The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.
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So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.
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Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
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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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Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
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Lets take full advantage of this discovery
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To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
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Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.
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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?