William James: Trending quotes (page 11)

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“My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.”

William James

Sometimes paraphrased as "Thinking is for doing", perhaps originally by S.T. Fiske (1992)
Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 22

Thinking

“An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 9

“Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.”

William James

Robert Gould Shaw: Oration upon the Unveiling of the Shaw Monument
1910s, Memories and Studies (1911)

People , Democracy

“The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 5

Study

“I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully — and losing it — just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote.”

William James

To his young son from the Yosemite Valley on (28 August 1989)
1920s, The Letters of William James (1920)

Life , Books , Way , Boy

“One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question,—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.”

William James

Lectures XVI and XVII, "Mysticism"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Life , Truth , Lie , Question

“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 25

“Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. … But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”

William James

"Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher'" http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/houghton/exhibits/james/psychical/7_8.cfm, in The American Magazine, Vol. 68 (1909), p. 589
Often (mis)quoted as: "We are like islands in the sea; separate on the surface but connected in the deep", or: "Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground."
1900s

Tree , Sea

“An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.”

William James

"The Importance of Individuals"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

“A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.”

William James

Lectures XI, XII, and XIII, "Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Faith

“The practical consequence of such a[n individualistic] philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,—is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess.”

William James

"Preface"
1910s, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1911)

People , Imagination , Passion , Dead

“All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.”

William James

Lecture at the Harvard Divinity School (13 March 1884); published in the The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine as The Dilemma of Determinism http://books.google.com/books?id=38DVAAAAMAAJ&q=%22All+our+scientific+and+philosophic+ideals+are+altars+to+unknown+gods%22&pg=PA196#v=onepage (September 1884)
1880s

God

“A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.”

William James

As quoted in William James: The Essential Writings (1971), edited by Bruce W. Wilshire, p. xiii
1900s

“So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.”

William James

The Moral Equivalent of War http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm
1910s, Memories and Studies (1911)

War

“Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us.”

William James

The Social Value of the College-Bred http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/jaCollegeBred.html
1910s, Memories and Studies (1911)

Men , World , Loss

“We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.”

William James

Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) edited by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 225
1880s

Love

“The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.”

William James

Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Way , Fashion , Suffering , Universe

“The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance…This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.”

William James

The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) p.153
1880s

Idea , Chance

“There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.”

William James

The Will to Believe http://infomotions.com/etexts/philosophy/1800-1899/james-will-751.htm (1897)
1890s

Truth

“As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 9

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