William James Quotes
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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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.
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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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You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
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The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
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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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Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
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Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?
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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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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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Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
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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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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
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A man of sense is never discouraged by difficulties; he redoubles his industry and his diligence, he perseveres and infallibly prevails at last.
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A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.
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Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
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As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
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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 essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation.