William James - The Will to Believe (1896)

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Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

William James
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.

William James
Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

William James
It seems a priori improbable that the truth should be so nicely adjusted to our needs and powers... In the great boardinghouse of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom come out so even and leave the plates so clean.

William James
I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.

William James
The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.

William James
Fondness for the word 'scientist' is one of the notes by which you may know its votaries; and its [science's] short way of killing any opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it 'unscientific.'

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

William James
Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

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
If this life be 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.

William James
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.

William James
Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?

William James
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities — his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.

William James
Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.

William James
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

William James
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.

William James
There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists.

William James
Roundabout the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

William James
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.

William James
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.

William James
There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

William James
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.

William James