William James Quotes
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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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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 strenuous life tastes better
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
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A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.
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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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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
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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 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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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
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You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
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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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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
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I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.
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If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole.
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Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
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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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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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It is your friends who make your world.
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As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
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Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
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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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There is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me!"