William James Quotes (228 Quotes)

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.

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

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.

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

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.

O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy ... In finishing it I found ... such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.

I will act as if what I do makes a difference.

The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.

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

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

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.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

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.

Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.

Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.

Modern man ... has not ceased to be credulous ... the need to believe haunts him.

The inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head.... Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal, they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them.... The part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself.

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

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.

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.