William James Quotes

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

...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.

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

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.

The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested.

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.

If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions.... But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.

What our human emotions seem to require, is the sight of struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten things become ignoble. Sweat and effort,
human nature strained to the uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through it alive, and then turning back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still — this is the sort of thing that inspires us.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substituting a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

We have ...as M. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories. The visual... tactile... muscular... auditory memory may all vary independently... and different individuals may have them developed in different degrees. As a rule, a man’s memory is good in the departments in which his interest is strong; but those departments are apt to be those in which his discriminative sensibility is high. ...[D]ifferences in men’s imagining power... the machinery of memory must be largely determined thereby.

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain