William James Quotes

PICARD: Did you read that book I gave you? (Wesley reacts, barely concealing a grimace as he recalls.)
WESLEY: Some of it.
PICARD: That's reassuring.
WESLEY: I just don't have much time.
PICARD: (re the book in his hand) There is no greater challenge than the study of philosophy. (Wesley glances over at Picard's book)
WESLEY: William James sure won't be on my Starfleet exams.
PICARD: The important things never will be. Anyone can be trained to deal with technology, and the mechanics of piloting a starship.
WESLEY: But Starfleet Academy--
PICARD: It takes more than just that. Open your mind to the past... to history, art, philosophy. And then... (re: the stars) ...this will mean something.
(Wesley considers this, almost embarrassed as he realizes Picard does truly care about him.)
Then: PICARD (continuing) Just consider James' wisdom: "Philosophy... is not a technical matter... it is our sense of what life honestly means... our individual way of feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos."
(then) That's what I want for you.

From:
STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION
"Samaritan Snare" #40272-143
Written by Robert L. McCullough ~ Jean-Luc Picard

Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. ~ William James

I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition
it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind
yet what miles away in the point of preciousness! ~ William James

I gave all up to him to do with me as he pleased, and was willing that God should rule over me at his pleasure, ~ William James

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures. ~ William James

We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them. ~ William James

All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on. ~ William James

The greatest discovery of the 19th century was not in the realm of the physical sciences, but the power of the subconscious mind touched by faith. Any individual can tap into an eternal reservoir of power that will enable them to overcome any problem that may arise. All weaknesses can be overcome, bodily healing, financial independence, spiritual awakening, and prosperity beyond your wildest dreams. This is the superstructure of happiness. ~ William James

Edwards says elsewhere: "I am bold to say that the work of God in the conversion of one soul, considered together with the source foundation, and purchase of it, and also the benefit, end, and eternal issue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the creation of the whole material universe. ~ William James

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self. ~ William James

Dynamic equivalence is a central concept in the translation theory, developed by Eugene A. Nida, which has been widely adopted by the United Bible Societies...Purporting to be an academically linguistic concept, it is in fact a sociocultural concept of communication. Its definition is essentially behavourist: determined by external forces, such as society--with strong pragmatist overtones--focusing on the reader rather than the writer. [M]ost twentieth-century American philosophical endeavours are predominantly pragmatist, dwelling in the shadows cast by William James and John Dewey. ~ J. Cammenga

We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind. ~ William James

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified. ~ William James

To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education. ~ William James

Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force ... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.. ~ William James

The essence of education is, in the words of William James, to teach a person what deserves to be valued, to impart ideals as well as knowledge, to cultivate in students the ability to distinguish the true and good from their counterfeits and the wisdom to prefer the former to the latter. ~ William J. Bennett

The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind ~ William James

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable. ~ William James

Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated. ~ William James

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will ... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. ~ William James

Sometimes you cant understand why things happen the way they do.. unwillingly were forced to ride the waves.. and thats hard for us humans, considering were programmed to make sense of the chaos, rationalize with the unrational.. and right when you feel theres no life left to be drained, right before the point of giving up.. something happens. its almost super natural, this phenomenon in which there always seems to be a slight, bleak sign of hope. a small light in the dark. but its all i needed. and now that the waves have calmed.. i feel almost, warm, senseable.. i feel safe, i feel sound. and in this moment. i know where i stand. i dont question it anymore. its just where im suppose to be. ~ William James Peter O'Brien

The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn. ~ William James

Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself. ~ William James

Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact ... The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual. ~ William James

There is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me!" ~ William James

Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. ~ William James

We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. ~ William James

We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit , power , and love of our Redeemer. ~ William James

Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes. ~ William James

I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing. ~ William James

New habits can be launched. ~ William James

Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead of nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust: whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily strength. I alleged these reasons to those who so often accused my visions of being the work of the enemy of mankind and the sport of my imagination ... . I showed them the jewels which the divine hand had left with me: - they were my actual dispositions. ~ William James

In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body. ~ William James

To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt. ~ William James

How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds. ~ William James

At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? ~ William James

If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err. ~ William James

Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely. ~ William James

WHEN YOU ARE 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 ~ Jack Canfield

So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end ... and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. ~ William James

Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries? ~ William James

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one. ~ William James

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. which give happiness. Thomas Jefferson We never enjoy perfect happiness; our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness; some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction. ~ William James

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible. ~ William James

A stream of ideal tendency embedded in the external structure of the world. ~ William James

I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. ~ William James

A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock ~ William James

Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality. ~ William James

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone. ~ William James

Every claim creates an obligation. ~ William James

Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief callfor a God on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons. ~ William James

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. ~ William James

What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand." ~ 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

We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, "I must get up, this is ignominious," etc.; but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day's life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, "Hollo! I must lie here no longer" – an idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea of rising in the condition of wish and not of will. The moment these inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects. ~ William James

Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind. ~ William James

Of course we measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice until itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth. ~ William James

Truth in our ideas means their power to work. ~ William James

Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections ~ William James

The notion of God, on the other hand, however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. ~ William James

The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds. ~ William James

I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ. ~ William James

Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them. ~ William James

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

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. ~ William James

Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities. ~ William James

Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. ~ William James

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

Lust of ease and comfort absolutely destroys mental toughness and begins to slowly erode ones character. ~ William James Moore

Had Martha Foley returned William [James Sidis]'s passion as Margaret [Engemann] did Norbert [Wiener]'s, perhaps the two prodigies would have had more in common in the long run. ... In the life of a prodigy, perhaps more than in the average life, a marriage or a requited love is the greatest single factor that can heal the old childhood wounds. William and Norbert's response to their childhood and teenage rejections and humiliations was to retreat into the painless world of ideas, where successes and satisfactions abounded. A successful love affair could be the key to reentry into the world of feeling, bridging the gap between the cerebral and the emotional lives. ~ Amy Wallace

If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it. ~ William James

Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain ~ William James

Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle. ~ William James

The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook. ~ William James

Men's activities are occupied into ways
in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind. ~ 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

When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion. ~ William James

The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed. ~ William James

We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing. ~ William James

Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention ... But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them. ~ William James

Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply. ~ William James

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points. ~ William James

I will act as if I do make a difference. ~ William James

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not. ~ William James

The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires. ~ William James

The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's. ~ William James

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

Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them. ~ William James

The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, how so ever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply removing portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monoto ~ William James

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. ~ William James

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power. ~ William James

Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions. ~ William James

First ... 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. ~ William James

As Newman struggled free of parental domination, he achieved a less constricted morality and became more comfortable with himself. In that greater comfort, he moved toward a greater comfort with, and willingness to be responsible for, others. None of the great psychologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Freud and William James, had had anything to say about adult maturational processes like this. But over the decades, we at the Grant Study have watched fascinated as Adam Newman and his fellows changed and grew. ~ George E. Vaillant

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

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose. ~ William James

The progress of the sciences toward theories of fundamental unity, cosmic symmetry (as in the unified field theory) - how do such theories differ, in the end, from that unity which Plato called "unspeakable" and "indiscribable," the holistic knowledge shared by so many peoples of the earth, Christians included, before the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West? In the United States, before spiritualist foolishness at the end of the last century confused mysticism with "the occult" and tarnished both, William James wrote a master work of metaphysics; Emerson spoke of "the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One . . ."; Melville referred to "that profound silence, that only voice of God"; Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found "more divine than yourself. ~ Peter Matthiessen

Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins ~ William James

Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results. ~ William James