William James Quotes
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I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
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To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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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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From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.
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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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Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
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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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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
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Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
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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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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
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What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.
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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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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
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All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
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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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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.