Top 500 William James Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

204. “The life of religion consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

— William James

205. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

209. “It is your friends who make your world.”

— William James

210. “Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions 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. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”

— William James

211. “It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.”

— William James

212. “Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.”

— William James

213. “A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith’s usual result.”

— William James

214. “To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.”

— William James

215. “If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.”

— William James

216. “You can’t out-perform your self-image.”

— William James

217. “Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess.”

— William James

218. “Psychology is the science of mental life.”

— William James

219. “Every claim creates an obligation.”

— William James

220. “Events are influenced by our very great desires.”

— William James

221. “We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.”

— William James

222. “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.”

— William James

223. “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.”

— William James

224. “There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.”

— William James

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

— William James

226. “Impulse without reason is not enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.”

— William James

227. “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”

— William James

228. “Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other’s being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.”

— William James

229. “Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.”

— William James

230. “Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life.”

— William James

231. “Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.”

— William James

232. “Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse.”

— William James

233. “The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.”

— William James

234. “The perfection of rottenness.”

— William James

235. “Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.”

— William James

236. “Life feels like a real fight – as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.”

— William James

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

— William James

238. “We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.”

— William James

239. “I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.”

— William James

240. “With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.”

— William James

241. “As the brain changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.”

— William James

242. “The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.”

— William James

243. “The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.”

— William James

244. “The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”

— William James

245. “We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.”

— William James

246. “The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.”

— William James

247. “Pragmatism has to postpone dogmatic answer, for we do not yet know certainly which type of religion is going to work best in the long run.”

— William James

248. “All of us are beggars here.”

— William James

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

— William James

250. “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.”

— William James