Top 500 William James Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one.”

— William James

152. “Individuality is founded in feeling.”

— William James

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

159. “Habit is the great flywheel of society.”

— William James

160. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

163. “In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.”

— William James

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

— William James

165. “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

166. “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

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

— William James

168. “A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”

— William James

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

— William James

170. “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

171. “Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement’s of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.”

— William James

172. “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

173. “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.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

181. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

184. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

187. “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

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

— William James

189. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

193. “Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.”

— William James

194. “When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.”

— William James

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

— William James

196. “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

197. “The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.”

— William James

198. “You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.”

— William James

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

— William James

200. “Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.”

— William James