Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that ensures the successful outcome of the venture.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience
All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
WILLIAM JAMES, "The Dilemma of Determinism"
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Moral Equivalent of War
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
WILLIAM JAMES, "Is Life Worth Living?", The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
WILLIAM JAMES, letter to H. G. Wells, Sep. 11, 1906
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, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.
WILLIAM JAMES, Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness," The Varieties of Religious Experience
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, "What Pragmatism Means," Pragmatism
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.
WILLIAM JAMES, Principles of Psychology
Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
WILLIAM JAMES, Lectures VI and VII, "The Sick Soul," The Varieties of Religious Experience
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, Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic," The Varieties of Religious Experience
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
WILLIAM JAMES, Principles of Psychology
Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.
WILLIAM JAMES, attributed, The Thought and Character of William James
The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
WILLIAM JAMES, "The Dilemma of Determinism"
The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
WILLIAM JAMES, Lecture XX, "Conclusions," The Varieties of Religious Experience
Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
WILLIAM JAMES, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
WILLIAM JAMES, Principles of Psychology
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
WILLIAM JAMES, Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic," The Varieties of Religious Experience
First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
WILLIAM JAMES, Lecture VI, "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth," Pragmatism
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES, Some Problems of Philosophy
The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition — it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind — yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
WILLIAM JAMES, letter to Henry Rutgers Marshall, Feb. 7, 1899
I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Moral Equivalent of War
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
WILLIAM JAMES, Principles of Psychology
Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience
So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.
WILLIAM JAMES, The Moral Equivalent of War
Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
WILLIAM JAMES, Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness," The Varieties of Religious Experience
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, The Principles of Psychology
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
WILLIAM JAMES, letter to Carl Stumpf, Jan. 1, 1886
The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.
WILLIAM JAMES, "Robert Gould Shaw: Oration Upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument," Memories and Studies
I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
WILLIAM JAMES, Lecture III, "Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered," Pragmatism
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
WILLIAM JAMES, Principles of Psychology
Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.
WILLIAM JAMES, "The Scope of Psychology"
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES, attributed, Wisdom for the Soul
