William James Quotes & Sayings

Men's activities are occupied into ways
in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind. — William James

Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist. — William James

If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err. — William James

A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock — William James

The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances. — William James

Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure. — William James

A man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries — William James

Volition ... takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness. — William James

Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor. — William James

Four Characters in Consciousness - How does it go on? We notice immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:

1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness.

2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing.

3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.

4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects - chooses from among them, in a word - all the while. — William James

There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life. — William James

Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge. — William James

Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes. — William James

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract — William James

Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. — William James

It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own. — William James

But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable. — William James

Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. — William James

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing. — William James

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one. — William James

In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age. — William James

If you say that this is absurd, that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd. — William James

To spend life for something which outlasts it. — William James

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. — William James

It's turtles all the way down. — William James

A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first. — William James

Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so. — William James

Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. — William James

It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever ... — William James

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. — William James

The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts. — William James

Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them. — William James

Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner. — William James

The voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, and act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. To feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and courage will very likely replace fear. — William James

Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself. — William James

Action and feeling go together, and by regulating the action ... we can directly regulate the feeling. — William James

There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other. — William James

In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient. — William James

The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden. — William James

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it. — William James

He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed. — William James

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. — William James

Choose a self and stand by it. — William James

Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is All striving is vain, will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him. — William James

There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking. — William James

To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her. — William James

From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust. — William James

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. — William James

The war for our Union, with all the constitutional issues which it settled, and all the military lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but one meaning in the eyes of history. It freed the country from the social plague which until then had made political development impossible in the United States. More and more, as the years pass, does the meaning stand forth as the sole meaning. — William James

Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead of nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust: whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily strength. I alleged these reasons to those who so often accused my visions of being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of my imagination ... . I showed them the jewels which the divine hand had left with me: - they were my actual dispositions. — William James

Genius ... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. — William James

So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end ... and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. — William James

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation. — William James

To change one's life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions. — William James

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. — William James

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal. — William James

Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows. — William James

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep. — William James

The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows. — William James

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake. — William James

What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S ... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it. — William James

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough. — William James

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will ... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. — William James

Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its string can so often depart and turn into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it ... — William James

I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide. — William James

The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands. — William James

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? — William James

Impulse without reason is not enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift. — William James

True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution. — William James

The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be. — William James

The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists. — William James

Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. — William James

To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind. — William James

Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you. — William James

We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude. — William James

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher. — William James

No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends. — William James

The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity , with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides. — William James

Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience — William James

For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers. — William James

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not so. — William James

The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them. — William James

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings. — William James

The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory. — William James

What do believers in the Absolute mean by saving that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is 'overruled' already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business. — William James

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. — William James

How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds. — William James

We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self ... " — William James

'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. — William James

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. — William James

We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are given why we should not pray. Others give reasons why we should pray. Very little is said of the reason we do pray. The reason is simple: We pray because we cannot help praying. — William James

The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's. — William James

When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness. — William James

There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing — William James

Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know. — William James

Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. — William James

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. — William James

To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education. — William James

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. — William James

Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it. — William James