Top 500 William James Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

209. “Every claim creates an obligation.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

214. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

217. “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

218. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

222. “The perfection of rottenness.”

— William James

223. “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

224. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

231. “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

232. “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

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

— William James

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “All of us are beggars here.”

— William James

238. “The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

241. “Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.”

— William James

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

— William James

243. “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

244. “Time itself comes in drops.”

— William James

245. “It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

— William James

246. “Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.”

— William James

247. “Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.”

— William James

248. “The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.”

— William James

249. “Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.”

— William James

250. “The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.”

— William James