William James Quotes

“But even italics fail to do justice to this magnificent outburst, the last stand of William James for the spirit of man. What can one say about the philosophical bravado, the cosmic effrontery, the sheer panache of this ailing philosopher with one foot in the grave talking down the second law of thermodynamics? It is a scene fit to set alongside the death of Socrates. The matchless incandescant spirit of the man!”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“Late in January “The Moral Equivalent of War” was published. James had recast the argument, dropping the idea of voluntary poverty and proposing instead that young people be universally conscripted to work in coal and iron mines, on fishing boats, at road- and tunnel-building, in foundries, and on building construction. As John Dewey would remark, “An immense debt is due William James for the mere title of his essay.”8”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“A grumpy thank-you note from brother Bob urged William, “For God’s sake stop your research for truth (pragmatic or otherwise) and try and enjoy life.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“James transfers our attention from substance to process, from a concept of self to the process of selving, from the concept of truth to the process of truing (as a carpenter with a plane “trues” or “trues up” a board), from a trust in concepts to an interest in percepts or perceptions.16 James is arguing that it is relations between things that matter, not objects or subjects as such.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“James thought all that could now be done was face the fact that “in every national soul there lie potentialities of the most barefaced piracy and our own American soul is no exception . . . It is good to rid ourselves of cant and humbug, and to know the truth about ourselves.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“he is too religious for the unbelievers and not religious enough for the believers.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“His book gives a courteous hearing to great saints, famous poets, itinerant preachers, illiterate converts, street-mission workers, anonymous responders to questionnaires, and Victorian gentlemen with three names.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“We think of William James as an affirmer, like Emerson or Whitman, so it is sobering to note just how much of what one usually thinks of as religion James rejects at the start. He has no interest, he claims, in “your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation and retained by habit.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost, and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes after they are long dead, and puts them on the top.”12”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“The “orthodox deduction of God’s attributes is nothing but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary-adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs, something that might be worked out from the mere word ‘God’ by a logical machine of wood and brass as well as by a man of flesh and blood . . . The attributes which I have quoted,” he explains, “have absolutely nothing to do with religion, for religion is a living practical affair.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“We all learn sooner or later that we must gather ourselves up and more or less arbitrarily concentrate our interests, throw much overboard to save any.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“I am in his power who can gratify my wishes and inflict my fears. Not to be a slave, then, I must have neither desire nor aversion for anything in the power of others.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“The constitutional disease from which I suffer,” he wrote, “is what the Germans call Zerrissenheit or torn-to-pieces-hood. The days are broken in pure zig-zag and interruption.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“which is that “the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression.” James says it is the other way around: “My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.” We are accustomed, he says, to think that “we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect . . . We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike or tremble because we are sorry, angry or fearful.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“Walt Whitman’s eye, that “the history of the world is the progress in the consciousness of freedom . . . The scheme is this: the oriental world only knew that one is free [that is, the ruler]; the Greek and Roman world knew that some are free [the ruling classes]; but we know that all men, in their true nature, are free,—that man, as man, is free.”2”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“So the individual matters, or at least may matter. “That the course of destiny maybe altered by individuals no wise evolutionist ought to doubt,” he writes, and he explains why. “Whenever we espouse a cause we contribute to the determination of the evolutionary standard of right . . . Again and again,” he urges, “success depends on energy of act, energy again depends on faith that we shall not fail, and that faith in turn on the faith that we are right—which faith thus verifies itself.”10”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“faith but a leap resulting from faith.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“In fact, he maintains, “we cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“the universe which makes an appeal to this generous power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“some way recognize their reply, that I can be a match for it if I will, and not a footless waif.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“James here singles out for disapproval “a pessimistic principle like Schopenhauer’s incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann’s wicked jack-of-all-trades, the Unconscious.” The trouble with determinism, fatalism, pessimism, the unconscious, and materialism is that in our better hours we feel such limited and limiting forces to be “so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in human affairs.” Each explains away the objects of our thought or translates them “into terms of no emotional pertinency, [leaving] the mind with little to care or act for.”4 James pins his argument to daily life. “It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests,” he writes. “Cognition is incomplete until discharged in act.”5”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“The essay starts from “the assumption that if thought is not to stand forever pointing at the universe in a maze of helpless wonder, its movement must be diverted from the useless channel of purely theoretic contemplation.” James then undertook to redeem thought from what he understood as unmoored theory. He aimed, he said, to determine “what that definition of the universe must be which shall awaken active impulses capable of effecting this diversion.” He was looking, not for some definition of the universe that would prove “true” in some absolute or abstract way, but for a definition that would call upon our best energies. “A conception of the world which will give back to the mind the free motion which has been checked, blocked, and inhibited in the purely contemplative path will . . . make the world seem rational again.”3 The boldness and novelty of this approach can hardly be overstated.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“Noting that “consciousness is presumably at its minimum in creatures whose nervous system is simple,” James suggests that consciousness “is most needed where the nervous system is highly evolved,” and he asks what defects exist in highly evolved nervous systems for which consciousness might be the remedy. “Whoever studies consciousness, from any point of view whatever, is ultimately brought up against the mystery of interest and selective attention.” James concludes that the function of consciousness is to enable us to select, to give us the ability “always to choose out of the manifold experiences present to it [consciousness] at a given time some one for particular accentuation, and to ignore the rest.” The passenger may, if it interests him, and if he selects it for attention, take hold of the helm and raise, lower, or reef the sail, and so, in small but meaningful ways, direct the voyage. Such a person, taking such actions, cannot fairly be called an automaton.17”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“materialist nor an idealist approach, but experimental, or as it will come to be called, phenomenological, or functional.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“The inference is that consciousness develops or evolves “to remedy defect of brain.”9 Most important, the advent of consciousness (James is still thinking in evolutionary terms) means the end of the reign of chance and the beginning of the reign of intelligence.10 Accepting consciousness as an active, choosing, comparing process also means abandoning pure materialism and pure determinism. “I for one,” James concluded his sixth and last lecture, “as a scientific man and practical man alike, deny utterly that Science compels me to believe that my conscience is an ignis fatuus or outcast, and I trust that you too after the evidence of this evening will go away strengthened in the natural faith that your delights and sorrows, your loves and hates, your aspirations and efforts are real combatants in life’s arena, and not impotent, paralytic spectators of the game.”11”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“The freshness of James’s views in these lectures comes partly from his tenacious returning again and again to the question of what it is about consciousness that makes it a trait favored by evolution. The value—the evolutionary or survival value—is the issue. “If consciousness can load the dice, can exert a constant pressure in the right direction, can feel what nerve processes are leading to the goal, can reinforce and strengthen these and at the same time inhibit those which threaten to lead us astray, why, consciousness will be of invaluable service.”8”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“man alike, lies in the last re-sort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of their interior characters, and nowhere else.”28”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“This claim has been made repeatedly, if a little hesitantly, as if we are afraid that calling it literary will detract from its standing as science or knowledge or thought. But James’s work is literary in the broad, eighteenth-century meaning of the word, which included, along with poems, plays, and novels, Johnson’s journalism, Burke’s political speeches, and Gibbon’s history of Rome. James himself said that anything considered historically should be considered part of the humanities. It was Rebecca West who first observed, in 1916, that one of the James brothers grew up to write fiction as though it were philosophy, and the other to write philosophy as though it were fiction.14”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“for reinforcements to deliver them from the newly armed mob in the streets below. The mob had been spreading terror for three days, “hunting down any man in certain localities of it wearing the uniform of our army.” During the hours he was shut up, Bob said, “The life of black soldiers in certain streets . . . was not worth five minutes purchase.”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“On the other hand, neither William nor Henry James went, nor did Edward Emerson, Julian Hawthorne, Tom Perry, or Charles s. Peirce.17 The war was”
― Robert D. Richardson Jr., William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism