Quotes from William James

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

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions 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. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

do every day or two something for no other reason that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition

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

Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.

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

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.

Belief creates the actual fact.

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.

When a thing is new, people say: 'It is not true.' Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: 'It is not important.' Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: 'Anyway, it is not new.

There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood

A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.

It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.

I don't sing because I'm happy. I'm happy because I sing.