William James quotes

“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.”

— William James

“The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.”

— William James

“The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.”

— William James

“Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.”

— William James

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”

— William James

“We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable. ”

— William James

“To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.”

— William James

“The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.”

— William James

“The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”

— William James

“Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!”

— William James

“Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”

— William James

“I will act as if what I do makes a difference.”

— William James

“If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.”

— William James

“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

“To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.”

— William James

“There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.”

— William James

“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”

— William James

“An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.”

— William James

“Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”

— William James

“The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.”

— William James

“Man lives for science as well as bread.”

— William James

“The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.”

— William James

“In business for yourself, not by yourself.”

— William James

“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.”

— William James

“Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”

— William James

“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

“An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.”

— William James

“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

“It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

— William James

“What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!”

— William James