William James Quotes - Page 3

Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James
We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals.
William James
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
William James
we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood
William James
The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.
William James
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.
William James
There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.
William James
Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.
William James
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.
William James
the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease
William James
It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.
William James
See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.
William James
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
William James
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.
William James