I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain… — William James Copy Share Image
What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious… — William James Copy Share Image
Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths… — William James Copy Share Image
Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically… — William James Copy Share Image
But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every… — William James Copy Share Image
We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get… — William James Copy Share Image
If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is… — William James Copy Share Image
Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite… — William James Copy Share Image
... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really… — William James Copy Share Image
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable… — William James Copy Share Image
All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting;… — William James Copy Share Image
The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of… — 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
In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds… — 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
