The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and… — William James Copy Share Image
A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful… — William James Copy Share Image
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting… — William James Copy Share Image
Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found… — William James Copy Share Image
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying… — William James Copy Share Image
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of… — William James Copy Share Image
Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted… — William James Copy Share Image
Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities,… — 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
