The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially… — 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
Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works… — 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
“This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best… — 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
When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when… — William James Copy Share Image
My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at… — William James Copy Share Image
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than… — William James Copy Share Image
“The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature… — William James Copy Share Image
Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural… — William James Copy Share Image
“Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still… — 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
