Quotes from William James

Freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

O God! What a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless between an evening and a morning

Some years ago Professor Patrick, of the Iowa State University, kept three young men awake for four days and nights. When his observations on them were finished, the subjects were permitted to sleep themselves out. All awoke from this sleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest to restore himself from his long vigil only slept one-third more time than was regular with him.

La mayoría de la gente vive en un círculo muy restringido de sus posibilidades. Todos nosotros tenemos reservas de vida en las que ni siquiera soñamos.

I gave all up to him to do with me as he pleased, and was willing that God should rule over me at his pleasure

Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only knows.

Believe truth! Shun error!—these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance.

It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever…

In forming a judgment of ourselves now, Edwards writes, we should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last day…. There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence…. The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine.

Nguyên t?c sâu s?c nh?t trong b?n tính con ng??i Ä'ó là sá»± thèm khát ???c tán th??ng.

If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.

so I stand here without further deprecatory words.

But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable.

Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and opens a region though they fail to give a map.

the rhetorical formulas of objurgation with which I was to begin a page of inquiries of you: whether you were dead

PSYCHOLOGY IS THE Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions.

It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no results. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy.

Says Saint Teresa:— Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to the head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead of nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust: whereas a genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of ineffable spiritual riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily strength.

The submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up.

These windings up of unfinished years continue till the unfinished life winds up.

He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical ability.

What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable.

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it 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.