William James Quotes
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There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
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Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
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Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
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A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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There is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
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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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If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
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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.
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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs
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Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.