William James Quotes
-
The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.
-
All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.
-
Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
-
The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
-
We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
-
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!
-
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 paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.
-
Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.
-
Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
-
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.
-
'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
-
As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
-
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.
-
We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
-
Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
-
General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
-
... the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.
-
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
-
The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
-
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
-
I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
-
The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
-
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.