Quotes from William James

...the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated...

The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.

Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.

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.

For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.

Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.

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

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.

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.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

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

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!

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

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.

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.

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.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.

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.

A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.