Top 500 William James Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.”

— William James

202. “Our beliefs are really rules for action.”

— William James

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

— William James

204. “The perfection of rottenness.”

— William James

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

— William James

206. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

209. “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

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

— William James

211. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

220. “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

221. “Time itself comes in drops.”

— William James

222. “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

223. “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

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

— William James

225. “All of us are beggars here.”

— William James

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

— William James

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

235. “How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?”

— William James

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

— William James

237. “Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying every one we meet under some general head.”

— William James

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

— William James

239. “Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes.”

— William James

240. “A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.”

— William James

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

— William James

242. “As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”

— William James

243. “Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.”

— William James

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

— William James

245. “Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.”

— William James

246. “The work that leads to a doctor’s degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one’s growth as a man to one’s growth as a specialist.”

— William James

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

— William James

248. “Footnotes – little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.”

— William James

249. “Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.”

— William James

250. “How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.”

— William James