Contents:
Enjoy the best William James Quotes at BrainyQuote. Quotations by William James, American Philosopher, Born January 11, Share with your friends. An intelligent quote book featuring a great American philosopher by Carol Dingle .
That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. 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 when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness , is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it. Happiness, like every other emotional state, has blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given it as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance. When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
He must ignore it; and to the bystander he may then seem perversely to shut his eyes to it and hush it up. Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that ensures the successful outcome of the venture. All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
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.
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it. 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. Let any one 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. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part and it may be the larger part always comes out of our own mind. Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past.
They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so. As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community. Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate.
They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them. Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits. Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries? The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
Inspirational , Belief , Fact , Creates. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance. None of us are ever who we were yesterday. Browse quotes by subject Browse quotes by author. Letter to his class at Radcliffe College, 6 Apr. I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences. Great , People , Thinking , Think , Many.
I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked. 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. There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease. The attempt at introspective analysis Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness. How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it. We need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. These then are my last words to you. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it. An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.
A stream of ideal tendency embedded in the external structure of the world. We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate! There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb. A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.
In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing. Life , Attitude , Generation , Discovery. Life , Will , Greatest , Something , Use. Inspirational , Belief , Fact , Creates. Best , Understanding , Study , Way , Normal.
Nature , Power , Alcohol , Cold , Facts. Happy , Sing , Because. Nothing , Task , Hanging , Eternal. Life , Change , Start , Immediately. God , Grace , Door , Through , Subliminal.