All William James Quotes
- Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what… Addition
- As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy… Appeals
- I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you… All
- The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes… All
- Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites,… Adulation
- I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which,… Active
- We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must… Acquisition
- Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind. Activities
- When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off… Account
- Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue… Act
- Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark. Bulwark
- [T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important. Difference
- A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He… Attending
- What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. Belief
- In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly. All
- To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified. Blessed
- Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins Begins
- Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with… Agreement
- When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain… Acquire
- It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may… Any