He was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, “The Principles of Psychology” (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given us such ideas as “the stream of thought. It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Husserl and John Dewey. The belief that religious experience involves much a supernatural domain, mostly inaccessible to science but accessible to the individual human subject, occupied his thoughts.
He made some of his most important philosophical contributions in the last decade of his life, defending anti-pragmatic and mystical view that concepts distort rather than reveal reality, which he described in “A Pluralistic Universe” and his views about religion, truth, knowledge, reality and philosophy, he presented in his work “Pragmatism”.
(1842 – 1910)
– William James Quotes –
To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
~ William James
Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
~ William James
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
~ William James
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
~ William James
Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
~ William James
Man lives for science as well as bread.
~ William James
What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition.
~ William James
Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
~ William James
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
~ William James
Belief creates the actual fact.
~ William James
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
~ William James
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
~ William James
It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
~ William James
By regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
~ William James
Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
~ William James
To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.
~ William James
In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.
~ William James
The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
~ William James
Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
~ William James
Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.
~ William James
To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.
~ William James
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
~ William James
Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
~ William James
Truth is what works.
~ William James
Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
~ William James
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
~ William James
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second.
~ William James
Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
~ William James
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
~ William James
Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
~ William James
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
~ William James
Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.
~ William James
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
~ William James
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
~ William James
Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
~ William James
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
~ William James
‘Pure experience’ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
~ William James
The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
~ William James
Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.
~ William James
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
~ William James
Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
~ William James
There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
~ William James
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
~ William James
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
~ William James
Time itself comes in drops.
~ William James
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
~ William James
Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
~ William James
If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
~ William James
A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
~ William James
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
~ William James
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
~ William James
Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
~ William James
Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
~ William James
Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
~ William James
Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
~ William James
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
~ William James
The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
~ William James
If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
~ William James
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
~ William James
Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
~ William James
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
~ William James
Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
~ William James
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
~ William James
One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.
~ William James
Common sense and
a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
~ William James
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
~ William James
It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
~ William James
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
~ William James
Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
~ William James
The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.
~ William James
In business for yourself, not by yourself.
~ William James
I will act as if what I do makes a difference.
~ William James
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
~ William James
I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.
~ William James
Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
~ William James
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
~ William James
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
~ William James
Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
~ William James
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
~ William James
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
~ William James
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
~ William James
The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
~ William James
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working.
~ William James
To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
~ William James
Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
~ William James
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind.
~ William James
If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
~ William James
When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.
~ William James
If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
~ William James
