William James Quotes
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Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.
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A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.
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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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An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.
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The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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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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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!
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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
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The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
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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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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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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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Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
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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.
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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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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.