William James: Trending quotes (page 7)

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”

“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.”

“… do every day or two something for no other reason that 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.”

“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.”

“Belief creates the actual fact.”

“I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.”

“Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”

“First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.”

“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”

“There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.”

“When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.”

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.”

“Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”

“It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.”

“A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”

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

“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”

“A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.”

“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.”