William James Quotes: 26

• The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

• A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

• Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.

• 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.

• The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

• Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

• The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

• Belief creates the actual fact.

• Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

• The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.

• The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.

• A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

• Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

  The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

• Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.

  The Principles of Psychology

• Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

  The Varieties of Religious Experience

• If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

• Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

  The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

• Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true,"it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?

• It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.

• we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood

• It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.

  The Varieties of Religious Experience

• إن بيننا وبين الله رابطة لا تنفصم، فإذا نحن أخضعنا أنفسنا لإشرافه - سبحانه وتعالى - تحققت أمنياتنا وآمالنا كلها.

• Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.

• the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease

• Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.

  The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1

• There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.

  The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1