William James: Trending quotes

William James trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
William James: 492 quotes38 likes

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”

William James

Source: 1920s, Collected Essays and Reviews (1920), Ch. 11 - Clifford's Lectures and Essays" (1879)

“The strenuous life tastes better”

William James

“A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.”

William James

“If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

William James Is Life Worth Living?

"Is Life Worth Living?"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

“Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.”

William James

“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”

William James

&quot;The Will to Believe&quot; p. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=Moqh7ktHaJEC&amp;pg=PA10 <br class="br">1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

“Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.”

William James

Statement of 1902 quoted in The William James Reader (2007), Vol I, p. 264
1900s

“In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 10

“No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”

William James

Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
1900s, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

“I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

William James

Diary entry (April 30, 1870) as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, p. 323; Letters of William James, vol. I, p. 147.
1870s

“So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 10

“The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition — it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind — yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!”

William James

To Henry Rutgers Marshall (7 February 1899)
1920s, The Letters of William James (1920)

“Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch.10

“If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.”

William James

Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.”

William James

Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”

William James

“What Pragmatism Means,” Pragmatism, pp. 60–61 (1931); lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Massachusetts (December 1906) and at Columbia University, New York City, (January 1907)
1900s

“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 13

“If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions…. But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 21

“The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.”

William James

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