Top 500 William James Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

259. “When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.”

— William James

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

— William James

261. “I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.”

— William James

262. “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

263. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

266. “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

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

— William James

268. “Truth in our ideas means their power to work.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences.”

— William James

275. “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

276. “Truth happens to an idea.”

— William James

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

— William James

278. “Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.”

— William James

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

— William James

280. “Once you accept an idea, it’s an idea whose time has come.”

— William James

281. “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

282. “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

283. “We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

287. “Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.”

— William James

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

— William James

289. “Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”

— William James

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

— William James

291. “The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.”

— William James

292. “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

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

— William James

294. “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

295. “Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.”

— William James

296. “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

297. “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

298. “That which is most personal, is most interesting.”

— William James

299. “True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience.”

— William James

300. “Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract.”

— William James