“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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot contr…" by William James?

William James 246

American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist 1842–1910

Related quotes

“save our emotional responses for real life.”

Ted Chiang (1967) American science fiction writer

Arrival

“We must never shed tears
That is the life form’s defeat and if we give into the emotions then it only becomes proof of our inability to control it.”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

“It is interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and that somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Existence (1956) p. 39; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part III : Contributions to Therapy, Ch. 6 : To Be and Not to Be, p. 94
Existence (1958)
Context: It is interesting that the term mystic is used in this derogatory sense to mean anything we cannot segmentize and count. The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and that somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it … Modern Western man thus finds himself in the strange situation, after reducing something to an abstraction, of having then to persuade himself it is real. … the only experience we let ourselves believe in as real, is that which precisely is not.