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William James Quotes
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William James was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labeled him the "Father of American psychology".

Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, James is considered to be one of the major figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. A Review of General Psychology analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty, and has even influenced Presidents, such as Jimmy Carter.

Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are The Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience, which also included the then theories on mind-cure.

✵ 11. January 1842 – 26. August 1910
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William James Quotes

“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

Change

“If you say that this is absurd, that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.”

William James

"What Makes a Life Significant?"
1910s, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1911)

Love , Friendship , People , Truth

“In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.”

William James Is Life Worth Living?

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

Heart

“Tell him to live by yes and no — yes to everything good, no to everything bad.”

William James

As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
1890s

“History is a bath of blood.”

William James

1900s, The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)

History

“What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, — nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.”

William James

The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)
1880s

Way , Feeling , Understanding , Nature

“I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.”

William James

Lecture III, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered
1900s, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

God , Personality

“Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities — his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.”

William James

"Reflex Action and Theism"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Life

“The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.”

William James

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

“The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 4

Education

“The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.”

William James

The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)
1880s

Faith

“Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain — under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.”

William James

The Social Value of the College-Bred
1910s, Memories and Studies (1911)

“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 15

Time

“The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness. The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.”

William James

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

Religion , Universe , Personality

“The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 8

Parting

“Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass,' so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”

William James

Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth
1900s, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

Truth , Parting

“Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.”

William James

Variant: Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservation agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.
Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 4

Children , Flying

“Man alone, of all the creatures on earth, can change his own patterns. Man alone is the architect of his destiny. The greatest revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives … It is too bad that most people will not accept this tremendous discovery and begin living it.”

William James

"Man alone, of all creatures of earth, can change his thought pattern and become the architect of his destiny." Actually said by Spencer W. Kimball, twelfth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in his Miracle of Forgiveness (1969), p. 114. This predates any of the misquotations.
Other forms: "The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind." This is also misattributed to Albert Schweitzer.
James did say: "As life goes on, there is a constant change of our interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of consciousness."
Misattributed

Bad luck , People , Change

“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.”

William James

To H. G. Wells (11 September 1906)
1920s, The Letters of William James (1920)

Bitch , Success , Disease

“There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience... that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end.”

William James

Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Home , Personality , Sense , Sadness

“Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than 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. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.”

William James

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 4

Self-confidence , Drawing , Effort , Exercises

“The mere word 'design' by itself has no consequences and explains nothing. It is the barrenest of principles. The old question of whether there is design is idle.”

William James

[Pragmatism, William James, Lecture Three: Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered, 80-81, Meridian Books, New York, 1955]https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.114743/2015.114743.Pragmatism-And-Four-Essays-From-The-Meaning-Of-Truth_djvu.txt}}
1900s

Question

“Overall there is a smell of fried onions”

William James

Claimed to be written by James while intoxicated by nitrous oxide. Does not appear in his essay Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide.
Misattributed
Claimed to be written by James while intoxicated by nitrous oxide. Does not appear in his essay Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide. First attributed, not necessarily seriously, by Robert Anton Wilson in his Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy (1979). Possibly Wilson's version is his humorous descendant of a statement in an 1870 address by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., about his own experience with chloroform: "A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole." In 1945 Bertrand Russell claimed that James reported a similar statement from an unnamed man.
Source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/31/turpentine-prevails/ Quote Investigator

“No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.”

William James The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

Source: "The Will to Believe" p. 15 http://books.google.com/books?id=Moqh7ktHaJEC&pg=PA15
Source: 1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)