Best Quotes by William James (Top 10)
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Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
William James
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James
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The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
William James
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
William James
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Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
William James
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The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
William James
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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
William James
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Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
William James
More William James Quotes
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Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
William James
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
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If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
William James
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Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
William James
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The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
William James
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Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
William James
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We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.
William James
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
William James
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Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
William James
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The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
William James
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If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
William James
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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.
William James
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
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Do something everyday for no other reason than 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.
William James
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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.
William James
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Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
William James
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The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
William James
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When a thing is new, people say: âIt is not true.' Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: âIt is not important.' Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: âAnyway, it is not new.
William James
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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
William James
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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
William James
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
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When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
William James
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
William James
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
William James
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Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
William James
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I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.
William James
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It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
William James
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The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
William James
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Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
William James
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As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
William James
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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
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Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
William James
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We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
William James
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
William James
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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
William James
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There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
William James
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The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success is our national disease.
William James
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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
William James
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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
William James
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
William James
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These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
William James
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I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
William James
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
William James
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
William James
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Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.
William James
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Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
William James
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We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.
William James
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He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
William James
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Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
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We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
William James
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When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.
William James
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
William James
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The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
William James
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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
William James
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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
William James
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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
William James
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Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
William James
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
William James
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No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
William James
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Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
William James
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
William James
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Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
William James
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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
William James
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
William James
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
William James
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James
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A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
William James
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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
William James
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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
William James
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Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
William James
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
William James
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The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
William James