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
A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively… — William James Copy Share Image
We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against… — William James Copy Share Image
...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions… — William James Copy Share Image
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. — William James Copy Share Image
Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. — William James Copy Share Image
There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise. — William James Copy Share Image
The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the… — 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
So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I… — 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
Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas. — William James Copy Share Image
Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt,… — William James Copy Share Image
The true'to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only… — William James Copy Share Image
... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not… — 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
