William James Quotes
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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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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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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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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
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The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
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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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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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As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
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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.
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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
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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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The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
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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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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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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.
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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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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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[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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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.