William James Quotes
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.
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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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On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
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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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Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.
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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.
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
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Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
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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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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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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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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
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There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing
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Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
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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 mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
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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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The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.
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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.
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A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.