Quotes from William James

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

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can... . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the ore our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work

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

One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.

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

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

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

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.

We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we cant tolerate.

Habit is second nature, or rather, ten times nature.

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

Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.

If a man's good for nothing else, he can at least teach philosophy.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.

Habit is… the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.

I wished, by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become one.