William James Quotes
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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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Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
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A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.
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Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
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The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.
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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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There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
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Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
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...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
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An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete... Its motor consequences are what clinch it.
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
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The greatest discovery of the 19th century was not in the realm of the physical sciences, but the power of the subconscious mind touched by faith. Any individual can tap into an eternal reservoir of power that will enable them to overcome any problem that may arise. All weaknesses can be overcome, bodily healing, financial independence, spiritual awakening, and prosperity beyond your wildest dreams. This is the superstructure of happiness.
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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
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Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
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What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.
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Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.