William James Quotes on Emotions (11 Quotes)


    A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.

    Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

    One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.

    When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.

    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. If we act as if from some better feeling, the bad feeling soon fold its tent like an Arab and silently steals away.


    The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.

    Action and feeling go together and by regulating the action which is under the more direct control of the will, we can regulate the feeling, which is not.

    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.

    It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.

    Religion ... shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.

    Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.


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