William James Quotes on Life (20 Quotes)

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

Religion ... is a mans total reaction upon life.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

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.

I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not. If I could, be... a great athlete and make a million a year, be a wit, a born -- vivant and a lady killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist ... and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint s the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up the philosopher and the lady killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably, at the outset of life. Be alike possible for a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more of less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully and pick out on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failure are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs carrying shame and gladness with them.

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.

These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to keep by force of inertia.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get vibrating through and through with intensely active life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is why great epochs are so rare, why the sudden bloom of a.

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.

'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.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

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

Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.

The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts life.

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.