William James Quotes
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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!.
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Time itself comes in drops.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.
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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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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.
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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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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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When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.
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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 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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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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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
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The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.
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Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.