Quotes from William James

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Time itself comes in drops.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

Truth is what works.

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their "agreement," as falsity means their disagreement, with "reality."

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

[Thinking is] what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.

So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.

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, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.

Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

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

Give your dreams all you've got and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.

Consciousness… does not appear to itself chopped up in bits…. A "river" or a "stream" are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar…. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.