William James Quotes
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I will act as if I do make a difference.
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Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
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Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
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There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
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A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.
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Time itself comes in drops.
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I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
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The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.
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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.
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
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I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.
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I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.