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William James QUOTES

William James QUOTES

1 " The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude. "

― William James

2 " Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. "

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

3 " Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. "

― William James

4 " A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. "

― William James

5 " See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. "

― William James , Pragmatism and Other Writings

6 " It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all. "

― William James , The Varieties of Religious Experience

7 " the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease "

― William James

8 " Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve. "

― William James , The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1

9 " Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner. "

― William James

10 " There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb. "

― William James , The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1

11 " An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric. "

― William James , Pragmatism and Other Writings

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

― William James

13 " Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. "

― William James

14 " We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals. "

― William James , The Varieties of Religious Experience

15 " If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. "

― William James

16 " Belief creates the actual fact. "

― William James

17 " It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,-that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. "

― William James , The Will to Believe

18 " It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. "

― William James

19 " In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient. "

― William James

20 " So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience. "

― William James