William James Quotes
-
...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
-
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
-
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
-
Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
-
The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success is our national disease.
-
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
-
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
-
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
-
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
-
The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.
-
On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
-
We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. ... You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.
-
Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
-
A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
-
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.
-
There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing
-
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
-
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
-
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
-
Effort is a measure of a Man.
-
'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.