Quotes from William James

Faith is when you believe something that you know ain't true.

Great emergencies and crisis show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

Man can never have enough without having too much.

Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts.

non-resistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends;

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate cooperates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities.

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

The opposition between the men who have and the men who are is immemorial.

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?

Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying every one we meet under some general head.

the faith state...is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending-desires to one direction... [p.272]

I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.

Act as if what you do makes a difference, it does.

What I was seeking, with resolute determination, was to live more intensely my own life, as against what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world. It was in the most real seasons that the Real Presence came, and I was aware that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God.

Knowledge about a thing is not the thing itself.

beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own,—sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.

When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable

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

Religious fermentation is always a symptom of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative pretensions, that our faiths do harm.

He believes in No-God, and he worships him

Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure.

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple—it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent.