William James > Quotes

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
― William James

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”
― William James

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
― William James

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
― William James

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
― William James

“To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.”
― William James

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
― William James

“Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”
― William James

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
― William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

“If you can change your mind, you can change your life.”
― William James

“The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.”
― William James

“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”
― William James

“We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.”
― William James

“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.”
― William James

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”
― William James

“Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.”
― William James

“Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.”
― William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
― William James

“Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.”
― William James

“Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.”
― William James

“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
― William James

“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter. ”
― William James

“To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds,”
― William James

“If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”
― William James

“Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … 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 mere inertia.”
― William James

“There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.”
― William James

“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction”
― William James

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

“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.
”
― William James

“A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.”
― William James

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

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

“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“...do every day or two something for no other reason that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.”
― William James, Habit

“We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the
meaning of it all.”
― William James

“Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.”
― William James

“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egoism.”
― William James

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”
― William James

“I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?”
― William James

“Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task”
― William James

“If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.”
― William James

“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”
― William James

“[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.”
― William James

“See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.”
― William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings

“Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions 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. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”
― William James

“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
― William James, The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”
― William James

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
― William James

“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.”
― William James