William James > Quotes

“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 Principles of Psychology (Complete Vol. 1-2)

“I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.”
― William James

“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else will affect its successful outcome”
― William James

“We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology

“Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.”
― William James, Is Life Worth Living?

“If my inborn faculties are good, I am a prophet; if poor, I am a failure: nature spews me out of her mouth, and there is an end of me.”
― William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

“It is you with the way you speak to yourself when you fall that determines if you have fallen into a pothole or into a grave.”
― William James

“No! our Science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this is at least is certain: that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea.”
― William James

“Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”
― William James

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
― William James

“What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world? These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark. If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril.”
― William James, The Will to Believe

“Even now I fear that some one of my… hearers may be making an undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of [their] life. It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. Then possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at once find that you are doing it, and, having learned what the trick feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.”
― William James, Meaning of Truth

“We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of it, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.”
― William James

“Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

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. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.”
― William James, The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1

“Religion . . . shall mean . . . 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 . . . The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely . . .”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience A Study in Human Nature

“mankind’s common instinct for reality…has always held the world to be essentially a theater for heroism.”
― William James

“Habit is the flywheel of progress.”
― William James

“For practical life at any rate, the CHANCE of salvation is enough. 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.”
― William James

“This is why metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting with the air; they have no practical issue of a sensational kind.”
― William James, Meaning of Truth

“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”
― William James

“The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.”
― William James

“The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.”
― William James

“Read Chapter 4: Habit”
― William James

“The pathos of death is this, that when the days on one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of an attitude, the echo of a certain mode of thought, a few pages of print, some invention, or some victory we gained in a brief critical hour, are all that can survive the best of us. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into the phantom of an attitude, into a mere musical note or phrase, suggestive of his singularity - happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgement. (Address at the centenary of Ralph Waldo Emerson).”
― William James, Pragmatism

“Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.”
― William James

“I have no doubt whatever that most people live – whether physically, intellectually or morally – in a very restricted circle of their potential being. We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon of which we do not dream.”
― William James

“...[To] admit ones liability to correction is one thing, [but] to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another.”
― William James

“shall never forget that night of September in which the veil that concealed from me my own incredulity was torn. I hear again my steps in the narrow, naked chamber where, long after the hour of sleep had come, I had the habit of walking up and down Anxiously I followed my thoughts as they descended from layer to layer towards the foundation of my consciousness, scattering one by one all the illusions that until then had screened its windings from my view, making them at every moment more clearly visible.

Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to the fragments of his vessel, vainly, frightened at the unknown void into which I was about to float. I turned with them towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and sacred to me; the inflexible current of my thought was too strong—parents, family, memory, beliefs—it forced me to let go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more severe as it drew near its term, and it did not stop until the end was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind, nothing was left that stood erect. This moment was a frightful one, and when towards morning, I threw myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live alone, alone with my fatal thought that had exiled me there, and which I was tempted to curse. The days that followed this were the saddest days of my life.”
― William James, As Variedades Da Experiência Religiosa

“We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James illustrated edition

“To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides.”
― William James