William James Quotes

433 Sourced Quotes

Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain — that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort whose residual properties [about which] we at present can frame no positive idea.

William James
The intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.

William James
Common-sense contents itself with the unreconciled contradiction, laughs when it can, and weeps when it must, and makes, in short, a practical compromise, without trying a theoretical solution.

William James
Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.

William James
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot

William James
The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.

William James
The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs

William James
Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.

William James
That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.

William James
The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.

William James
When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.

William James
As the sciences have developed further, the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations.

William James
The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.

William James
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.

William James
Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

William James
The aim of "science" is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them.

William James
The "marvels" of Science, about which so much edifying popular literature is written, are apt to be " caviare " to the men in the laboratories.

William James
It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.

William James
With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed. And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.

William James
We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.

William James
A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.

William James
All the magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science — our doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest — proceed from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of our experience.

William James
Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.

William James
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.

William James
The ignoring of data is, in fact, the easiest and most popular mode of obtaining unity in one's thought.

William James
Facts are there only for those who have a mental affinity with them. When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the academic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to interpret and discuss them, - for surely to pass from mystical to scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity...

William James
Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.

William James
Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it

William James
Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mentalfire.

William James
No bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

William James