Top 500 William James Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.”

— William James

252. “The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing.”

— William James

253. “Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”

— William James

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

— William James

255. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”

— William James

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

— William James

257. “There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.”

— William James

258. “There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.”

— William James

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

— William James

260. “Truth happens to an idea.”

— William James

261. “Most men’s friendships are too inarticulate.”

— William James

262. “Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.”

— William James

263. “We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition.”

— William James

264. “The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.”

— William James

265. “There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.”

— William James

266. “Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.”

— William James

267. “To give the theory plenty of ‘rope’ and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction.”

— William James

268. “To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.”

— William James

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

— William James

270. “Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.”

— William James

271. “The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.”

— William James

272. “Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.”

— William James

273. “An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

276. “Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins.”

— William James

277. “It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association.”

— William James

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

— William James

279. “Every claim creates an obligation.”

— William James

280. “Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.”

— William James

281. “The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.”

— William James

282. “In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.”

— William James

283. “Our environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans.”

— William James

284. “I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution.”

— William James

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

— William James

286. “As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.”

— William James

287. “No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.”

— William James

288. “As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.”

— William James

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

— William James

290. “Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.”

— William James

291. “If it works, it’s true.”

— William James

292. “In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.”

— William James

293. “I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.”

— William James

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

— William James

295. “Man’s chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.”

— William James

296. “The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.”

— William James

297. “Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.”

— William James

298. “The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.”

— William James

299. “Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.”

— William James

300. “The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”

— William James