Top 500 William James Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The true’to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”

— William James

452. “All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.”

— William James

453. “The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.”

— William James

454. “Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.”

— William James

455. “The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.”

— William James

456. “No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.”

— William James

457. “The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.”

— William James

458. “Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.”

— William James

459. “We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.”

— William James

460. “To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.”

— William James

461. “An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true.”

— William James

462. “Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.”

— William James

463. “It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence.”

— William James

464. “It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.”

— William James

465. “We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.”

— William James

466. “We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals.”

— William James

467. “To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein.”

— William James

468. “The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.”

— William James

469. “If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.”

— William James

470. “To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.”

— William James

471. “No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.”

— William James

472. “Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.”

— William James

473. “What a teacher needs to know about psychology “might almost be written on the palm of one’s hand.””

— William James

474. “In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.”

— William James

475. “From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.”

— William James

476. “There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.”

— William James

477. “Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.”

— William James

478. “A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock.”

— William James

479. “True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.”

— William James

480. “It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.”

— William James

481. “Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher’s art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.”

— William James

482. “It is so human a book that I don’t see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.”

— William James

483. “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.”

— William James

484. “In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common.”

— William James

485. “It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.”

— William James

486. “Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men’s spiritual energy.”

— William James

487. “How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.”

— William James

488. “Contemporary philosophers, even the rationalistic minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.”

— William James

489. “Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.”

— William James

490. “Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.”

— William James

491. “What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.”

— William James

492. “But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.”

— William James

493. “The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.”

— William James

494. “Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.”

— William James

495. “I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.”

— William James

496. “Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.”

— William James

497. “Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is NOT the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted.”

— William James

498. “In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.”

— William James

499. “In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.”

— William James

500. “The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. “His favorite occupation,” writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke “seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.”

— William James