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William James
177 quotes
“My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sometimes paraphrased as "Thinking is for doing", perhaps originally by S.T. Fiske (1992)
“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A thing is important if anyone think it important.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: William James, "Is Life Worth Living?," The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
Also quoted by: Henry James (misattributed)
“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 (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1842–1910) first seen 1891 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the International Journal of Ethics (April 1891)
“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 (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: William James, in The Will to Believe (1897)
Also quoted by: Gustave Flaubert (misattributed)
“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 (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Possibilities that fail to get realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all. There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual having been from eternity virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which 'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement of 1902 quoted in The William James Reader (2007), Vol I, p. 264
“A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in William James: The Essential Writings (1971), edited by Bruce W. Wilshire, p. xiii
“The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1906 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What Pragmatism Means,” Pragmatism, pp. 60–61 (1931); lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Massachusetts (December 1906) and at Columbia University, New York City, (January 1907)
“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Correspondence with Helen Keller, 1908, in The Correspondence of William James: April 1908–August 1910, Vol. 12, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, page 135, as cited in: Academics in Action!: A Model …
“Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher'", in The American Magazine, Vol. 68 (1909), p. 589
“To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion...is a man's total reaction upon life.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. ... The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for the purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness. The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. ... You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pivot round which the religious life... revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in—whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually—agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner "state" in which the thinking comes to pass.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“History is a bath of blood.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational purpose in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally allowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source