William James Quotes

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

“A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.”

“A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.”

“A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”

“A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.”

“Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

“Act the part and you will become the part.”

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”

“Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”

“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits - practical, emotional, and intellectual - systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.”

“Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.”

“Belief creates the actual fact.”

“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”

“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.”

“Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.”

“Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.”

“Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies… and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.”

“Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”

“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.”

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

“If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.”

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

“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.”

“If you can change your mind, you can change your life.”

“If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.”

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

“It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.”

“Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.”

“Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.”

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”

“Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.”

“Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.”

“Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”

“Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.”

“Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task.”

“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”

“Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.”

“Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.”

“The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.”

“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”

“The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time.”

“The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.”

“The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.”

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. We need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and it will become infallibly real.”

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”

“The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.”

“The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”

“The strenuous life tastes better.”

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”

“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

“There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.”

“There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.”

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

“There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.”

“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.”

“Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.”

“To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted.”

“To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.”

“To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

“We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”

“We don’t laugh because we are happy. We are happy because we laugh.”

“We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.”

“We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.”

“We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.”

“We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.”

“When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new'.”

“When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.”

“When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.”

“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”

“Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”

“Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.”

“You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.”

“Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.”

“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.”

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

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

“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.”

“Do every day or two something for no other reason 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.”

“The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

“What holds attention determines action.”

“In youth, we have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day… but as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”

“Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.”

“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”

“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”

“Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.”

“The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.”

“There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.”

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

“Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.”

“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”