Skip to content

Religion Quotes by William James

59 Religion quotes by William James

All Religion quotes William James’s page

William James writes that a true religious feeling is serious and gentle, not a grin or a snicker. He says faith is a belief that allows doubt, and that our view of the universe is shaped by how we accept it. He also notes that spiritual energy can act in the everyday world.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

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

Image

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

Image

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

Image

All religions begin with the cry Help.

Image

Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.

Image

“All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry "Help!”

Image

Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.

Image

[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.

Image

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

Image

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

Image

Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.

Image

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

Image

The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.

Image

There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.

Image

All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly…

Image

Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.

Image

There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS…

Image

Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly,…

Image

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

Image

“We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to…

Image

Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus…

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…

Image

“Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer would be…

Image

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or…

Image

Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a…

Image

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is…

Image

But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every…

Image

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

Image

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual…

Image

I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable…

Image

“The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed; and to him who has a hold…

Image

“A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty…

Image

“When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of…

Image

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

Image

Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins

Image

Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.

Image

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

Image

Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.

Image

“...the faith state...is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending-desires to one direction... [p.272]”

Image

At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.

Image

Other authors on Religion

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…