To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience… — William James Copy Share Image
If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given… — William James Copy Share Image
How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon,… — William James Copy Share Image
The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment… — William James Copy Share Image
Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil… — William James Copy Share Image
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory… — William James Copy Share Image
Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One… — William James Copy Share Image
I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral… — William James Copy Share Image
We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may… — William James Copy Share Image
We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments,… — 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
