William James Quotes
-
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
-
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
-
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.
-
No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
-
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
-
(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some 5 or 6 score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale.
-
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.
-
There is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me!"
-
All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
-
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.
-
[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.
-
The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
-
Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
-
A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
-
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
-
The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
-
Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
-
The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
-
To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
-
The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
-
If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known. If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long.
-
How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.
-
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.
-
Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.