William James Quotes
-
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.
-
'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
-
To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
-
We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
-
All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
-
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There must be thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.
-
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.
-
Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
-
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 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.
-
Time itself comes in drops.
-
I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
-
As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
-
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
-
Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
-
A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
-
Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
-
The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.
-
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.
-
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!.