Words matter. These are the best William James Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
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.
Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. 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.
Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
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.
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
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.
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.
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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.
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
Time itself comes in drops.
In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
‘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.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
To spend life for something which outlasts it.
Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
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.
There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.
Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
Truth is what works.
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second.
