William James Quotes

433 Sourced Quotes

I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.

William James
We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.

William James
Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.

William James
Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.

William James
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.

William James
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.

William James
For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

William James
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

William James
Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.

William James
No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.

William James
There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

William James
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

William James
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.

William James
Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper.

William James
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

William James
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

William James
You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.

William James
There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.

William James
Let anyone 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.

William James
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

William James
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

William James
Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.

William James
What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.

William James
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.... Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

William James
Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.

William James
The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.

William James
The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.

William James
Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

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.

William James
In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.

William James