Quotes from William James

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.

The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time

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.

Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.

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.

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.

... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.

Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.

How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?

We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.

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.

The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.

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

Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.

The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

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

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