Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common ha...
WILLIAM JAMES Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
WILLIAM JAMES Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
WILLIAM JAMES Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic current...
WILLIAM JAMES The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perce...
WILLIAM JAMES Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
WILLIAM JAMES I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces...
WILLIAM JAMES The most violent revolutions in an individuals beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time an...
WILLIAM JAMES If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then y...
WILLIAM JAMES Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of co...
WILLIAM JAMES Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
WILLIAM JAMES Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
WILLIAM JAMES We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
WILLIAM JAMES This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
WILLIAM JAMES Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
WILLIAM JAMES The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
WILLIAM JAMES If you want a trait, act as if you already have the trait.
WILLIAM JAMES I will act as if what I do makes a difference.
WILLIAM JAMES Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of ...
WILLIAM JAMES Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the act...
WILLIAM JAMES Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
WILLIAM JAMES What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise -- although the ph...
WILLIAM JAMES We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
WILLIAM JAMES We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We p...
WILLIAM JAMES Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
WILLIAM JAMES For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also...
WILLIAM JAMES I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those t...
WILLIAM JAMES We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simpl...
WILLIAM JAMES Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of thei...
WILLIAM JAMES Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of o...
WILLIAM JAMES Whenever two people meet there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, ...
WILLIAM JAMES Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of ...
WILLIAM JAMES If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
WILLIAM JAMES Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
WILLIAM JAMES A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a litt...
WILLIAM JAMES To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
WILLIAM JAMES I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most int...
WILLIAM JAMES Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
WILLIAM JAMES As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, c...
WILLIAM JAMES Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second. Give your dre...
WILLIAM JAMES Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
WILLIAM JAMES The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existe...
WILLIAM JAMES We don't laugh because we're happy -- we're happy because we laugh.
WILLIAM JAMES We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, m...
WILLIAM JAMES If merely feeling good could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
WILLIAM JAMES The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical facult...
WILLIAM JAMES Belief creates the actual fact.
WILLIAM JAMES As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
WILLIAM JAMES Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their ...
WILLIAM JAMES The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their...
WILLIAM JAMES Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving ...
WILLIAM JAMES Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be con...
WILLIAM JAMES A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
WILLIAM JAMES When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that in itself is a choice.
WILLIAM JAMES If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained... it is no better than a g...
WILLIAM JAMES I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular me...
WILLIAM JAMES It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaste...
WILLIAM JAMES If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the as if technique.
WILLIAM JAMES A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes...
WILLIAM JAMES Often quoted in forms that correspond only loosely to Hugo's original words, for example: No army ca...
WILLIAM JAMES Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher p...
WILLIAM JAMES Events are influenced by our very great desires.
WILLIAM JAMES If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
WILLIAM JAMES There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for ...
WILLIAM JAMES To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
WILLIAM JAMES Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
WILLIAM JAMES Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
WILLIAM JAMES It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
WILLIAM JAMES I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing t...
WILLIAM JAMES Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our mis...
WILLIAM JAMES There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
WILLIAM JAMES Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our...
WILLIAM JAMES Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my e...
WILLIAM JAMES Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for hero...
WILLIAM JAMES Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is w...
WILLIAM JAMES We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the...
WILLIAM JAMES The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
WILLIAM JAMES Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
WILLIAM JAMES There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
WILLIAM JAMES We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We p...
WILLIAM JAMES Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adula...
WILLIAM JAMES Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way.
WILLIAM JAMES Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is All striving is vain, will never reign sup...
WILLIAM JAMES Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
WILLIAM JAMES Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the conseq...
WILLIAM JAMES We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so who...
WILLIAM JAMES Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he f...
WILLIAM JAMES From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an...
WILLIAM JAMES Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price o...
WILLIAM JAMES If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
WILLIAM JAMES Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a ch...
WILLIAM JAMES No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments ma...
WILLIAM JAMES The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
WILLIAM JAMES The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for our...
WILLIAM JAMES Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vic...
WILLIAM JAMES Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of char...
WILLIAM JAMES To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
WILLIAM JAMES The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our c...
WILLIAM JAMES There is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!
WILLIAM JAMES Man lives for science as well as bread.
WILLIAM JAMES The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unwo...
WILLIAM JAMES It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
WILLIAM JAMES When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material u...
WILLIAM JAMES A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
WILLIAM JAMES There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious...
WILLIAM JAMES Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
WILLIAM JAMES Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appe...
WILLIAM JAMES The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
WILLIAM JAMES Act the part and you will become the part.
WILLIAM JAMES Faith isn't faith until it's all you're holding on to
WILLIAM JAMES When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all respon...
WILLIAM JAMES The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to...
WILLIAM JAMES The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his att...
WILLIAM JAMES Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between d...
WILLIAM JAMES These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and yo...
WILLIAM JAMES Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power
WILLIAM JAMES There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.
WILLIAM JAMES He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
WILLIAM JAMES A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified.
WILLIAM JAMES There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
WILLIAM JAMES For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which a...
WILLIAM JAMES Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
WILLIAM JAMES Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
WILLIAM JAMES Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether h...
WILLIAM JAMES He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
WILLIAM JAMES Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.
WILLIAM JAMES Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and in...
WILLIAM JAMES There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
WILLIAM JAMES A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other phil...
WILLIAM JAMES There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saint...
WILLIAM JAMES It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect ...
WILLIAM JAMES Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they h...
WILLIAM JAMES The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breath...
WILLIAM JAMES The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholes...
WILLIAM JAMES Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
WILLIAM JAMES Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.
WILLIAM JAMES The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
WILLIAM JAMES Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference betwe...
WILLIAM JAMES Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
WILLIAM JAMES I don't sing because I'm happy. I'm happy because I sing.
WILLIAM JAMES Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
WILLIAM JAMES The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
WILLIAM JAMES We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the ...
WILLIAM JAMES It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our...
WILLIAM JAMES The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner ...
WILLIAM JAMES Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor i...
WILLIAM JAMES Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourse...
WILLIAM JAMES See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, ob...
WILLIAM JAMES A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this su...
WILLIAM JAMES The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical facult...
WILLIAM JAMES One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on bo...
WILLIAM JAMES If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experi...
WILLIAM JAMES Time itself comes in drops.
WILLIAM JAMES In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.
WILLIAM JAMES The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is o...
WILLIAM JAMES No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments ma...
WILLIAM JAMES Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and in...
WILLIAM JAMES A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid ...
WILLIAM JAMES An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
WILLIAM JAMES There is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other ...
WILLIAM JAMES We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the oppos...
WILLIAM JAMES Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
WILLIAM JAMES The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his at...
WILLIAM JAMES The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sym...
WILLIAM JAMES The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy...
WILLIAM JAMES Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself,...
WILLIAM JAMES These, then are my last words to you: be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and ...
WILLIAM JAMES The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion....
WILLIAM JAMES The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
WILLIAM JAMES The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
WILLIAM JAMES The great use of a life is to spend for something that outlasts it.
WILLIAM JAMES The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
WILLIAM JAMES Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
WILLIAM JAMES Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to length...
WILLIAM JAMES The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his att...
WILLIAM JAMES How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great...
WILLIAM JAMES Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
WILLIAM JAMES To spend life for something which outlasts it.
WILLIAM JAMES The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squ...
WILLIAM JAMES If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you...
WILLIAM JAMES The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
WILLIAM JAMES Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to b...
WILLIAM JAMES The path to cheerfulness is to sit cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already t...
WILLIAM JAMES Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully ...
WILLIAM JAMES Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and in...
WILLIAM JAMES Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us.
WILLIAM JAMES Do every day or two something for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the ...
WILLIAM JAMES To change one's life: 1. Starte immediately, 2. Do it flamboyantly, 3. No exceptions. -William Jame...
WILLIAM JAMES To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
WILLIAM JAMES Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along ...
WILLIAM JAMES Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible
WILLIAM JAMES Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is pur...
WILLIAM JAMES No human being ever learns to live until he has awakened to the dormant powers within him
WILLIAM JAMES The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
WILLIAM JAMES Tell him to live by yes and no -- yes to everything good, no to everything bad.
WILLIAM JAMES 'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the mater...
WILLIAM JAMES