Top 500 William James Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.”

— William James

52. “The strenuous life tastes better.”

— William James

53. “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.”

— William James

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

— William James

55. “What holds attention determines action.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

58. “A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.”

— William James

59. “He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.”

— William James

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

— William James

61. “Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.”

— William James

62. “Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.”

— William James

63. “The education of attention would be an education par excellence.”

— William James

64. “From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.”

— William James

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

— William James

66. “When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.”

— William James

67. “Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.”

— William James

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

— William James

69. “Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don’t want to do.”

— William James

70. “To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.”

— William James

71. “To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.”

— William James

72. “Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”

— William James

73. “In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.”

— William James

74. “The word ‘cause’ is an altar to an unknown god.”

— William James

75. “Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.”

— William James

76. “The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

79. “If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.”

— William James

80. “In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.”

— William James

81. “A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.”

— William James

82. “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.”

— William James

83. “With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation.”

— William James

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

— William James

85. “For the moment, what we attend to is reality.”

— William James

86. “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”

— William James

87. “We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God’s influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

91. “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.”

— William James

92. “We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.”

— William James

93. “If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.”

— William James

94. “History is a bath of blood.”

— William James

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

— William James

96. “The path to cheerfulness is to sit cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”

— William James

97. “In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.”

— William James

98. “Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience.”

— William James

99. “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.”

— William James

100. “New habits can be launched.”

— William James