William James Quotes
-
Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
-
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
-
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.
-
I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.
-
To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
-
Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
-
We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
-
The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
-
Time itself comes in drops.
-
Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
-
Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
-
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
-
Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
-
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.
-
Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection.
-
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
-
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
-
The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.
-
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.
-
All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.