Top 500 William James Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

154. “Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.”

— William James

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

— William James

156. “We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.”

— William James

157. “The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.”

— William James

158. “It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”

— William James

159. “So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.”

— William James

160. “Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one.”

— William James

161. “The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.”

— William James

162. “Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.”

— William James

163. “It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.”

— William James

164. “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”

— William James

165. “No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.”

— William James

166. “My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.”

— William James

167. “The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”

— William James

168. “In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.”

— William James

169. “Mankind’s common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.”

— William James

170. “The emotions aren’t always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.”

— William James

171. “The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.”

— William James

172. “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.”

— William James

173. “The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man’s thoughts and another’s.”

— William James

174. “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot.”

— William James

175. “Do something everyday for no other reason than 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.”

— William James

176. “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.”

— William James

177. “Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.”

— William James

178. “All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.”

— William James

179. “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

— William James

180. “If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.”

— William James

181. “We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.”

— William James

182. “A man of sense is never discouraged by difficulties; he redoubles his industry and his diligence, he perseveres and infallibly prevails at last.”

— William James

183. “Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.”

— William James

184. “On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.”

— William James

185. “Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.”

— William James

186. “Lets take full advantage of this discovery.”

— William James

187. “Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.”

— William James

188. “We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.”

— William James

189. “Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.”

— William James

190. “The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.”

— William James

191. “Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.”

— William James

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

— William James

193. “Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”

— William James

194. “Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.”

— William James

195. “Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.”

— William James

196. “How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.”

— William James

197. “If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

— William James

Featured in: Real Quotes

198. “The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man’s nature.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James