Quotes from William James

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.

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than 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.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.

It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.

'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.

History is a bath of blood.

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

If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.

There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

Religion… is a man's total reaction upon life.

Religion… shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude.

Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

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

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that… it is always interested more in one part of its object [thought] than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.

The concrete man has but one interest—to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.