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Faith Quotes by William James

57 Faith quotes by William James

All Faith quotes William James’s page

A belief that declares something impossible can block new discoveries, as James warns. He also says that faith can carry you across a gap where doubt stalls, and that life gains meaning when we spend it on lasting goals. James notes that truth often survives on a credit system, staying accepted until challenged.

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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.

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Belief creates the actual fact. --William James

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Our beliefs are really rules for action.

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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.

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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins

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Belief creates the actual fact.

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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.

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A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.

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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. --William James

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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.

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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.

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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse

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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth

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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

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The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence…

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“In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.”

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Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should…

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These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe life is worth living and your belief will…

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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith…

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The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in…

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Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act…

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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious…

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In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied…

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Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true…

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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much…

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“Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it…

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Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much…

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“The submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent acquiescence in it, is…

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The greatest discovery of the 19th century was not in the realm of the physical sciences, but the power of the subconscious…

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Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we…

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“Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we…

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“It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly…

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“Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in…

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What do believers in the Absolute mean by saving that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute…

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“The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature…

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“Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act…

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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.

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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.

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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

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More by William James

Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we…

In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who…

“Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered…

Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.

'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or…

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

It is your friends who make your world.

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of 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,…

“How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and…

There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes…