QUOTES by William James
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“These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
Quote by -William James
“If this life is 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.”
Quote by -William James
“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”
Quote by -William James
“we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood”
Quote by -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.”
Quote by -William James
“If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”
Quote by -William James
“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”
Quote by -William James
“The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.”
Quote by -William James
“No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference… between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.”
Quote by -William James
“Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second”
Quote by -William James
“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”
Quote by -William James
“To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One”
Quote by -William James
“As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!”
Quote by -William James
“What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose.”
Quote by -William James
“In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.”
Quote by -William James
“Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.”
Quote by -William James
“A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.”
Quote by -William James
“Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness.”
Quote by -William James
“Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.”
Quote by -William James
“Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.”
Quote by -William James
“I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.”
Quote by -William James
“There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.”
Quote by -William James
“Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”
Quote by -William James
“The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.”
Quote by -William James
“To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.”
Quote by -William James
“The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives”
Quote by -William James
“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”
Quote by -William James
“Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.”
Quote by -William James
“But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.”
Quote by -William James
“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.”
Quote by -William James
“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.”
Quote by -William James