William James citations

Page 5

“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.”

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

“The strenuous life tastes better”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.”

“Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.”

“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.”

“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.”