An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation. — William James Copy Share Image
Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for… — William James Copy Share Image
The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb… — William James Copy Share Image
A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience… — William James Copy Share Image
Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions… — William James Copy Share Image
Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call… — William James Copy Share Image
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. — William James Copy Share Image
Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of… — William James Copy Share Image
The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the… — William James Copy Share Image
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual… — William James Copy Share Image
In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied… — William James Copy Share Image
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular… — William James Copy Share Image
There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual. — William James Copy Share Image
Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. — William James Copy Share Image
Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude. — William James Copy Share Image
The greatest discovery of the 19th century was not in the realm of the physical sciences, but the power of the subconscious… — William James Copy Share Image
When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind… — William James Copy Share Image
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and… — William James Copy Share Image
Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day… — William James Copy Share Image
Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors: the individual ... bearing all the power of initiative… — William James Copy Share Image
This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we… — William James Copy Share Image
Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world. — William James Copy Share Image
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… — William James Copy Share Image
In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who… — William James Copy Share Image
“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… — William James Copy Share Image
Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or… — William James Copy Share Image
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be. — William James Copy Share Image
Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. — William James Copy Share Image
Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them,… — William James Copy Share Image
“How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and… — William James Copy Share Image
