Quotes from William James

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

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.

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.

Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.

It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.

The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.

No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.

It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.

Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.

To spend life for something which outlasts it.

Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.

Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.

There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.

We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.

Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.

All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.

Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life

It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

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.