Top 500 William James Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.”

— William James

302. “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

303. “I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.”

— William James

304. “Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.”

— William James

305. “There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.”

— William James

306. “In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan’s neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend’s figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there – that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”

— William James

307. “It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.”

— William James

308. “I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.”

— William James

309. “All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.”

— William James

310. “Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon ’s glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.”

— William James

311. “We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.”

— William James

312. “The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.”

— William James

313. “Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections.”

— William James

314. “I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”

— William James

315. “Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man.”

— William James

316. “The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.”

— William James

317. “Don’t preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.”

— William James

318. “Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.”

— William James

319. “What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.”

— William James

320. “For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.”

— William James

321. “An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: “There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.” This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.”

— William James

322. “Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.”

— William James

323. “The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.”

— William James

324. “To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides.”

— William James

325. “Philosophy is “an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”

— William James

326. “To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.”

— William James

327. “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

328. “Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.”

— William James

329. “Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.”

— William James

330. “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

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

— William James

332. “Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.”

— William James

333. “The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.”

— William James

334. “You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.”

— William James

335. “Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life’s evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.”

— William James

336. “The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.”

— William James

337. “Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.”

— William James

338. “Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.”

— William James

339. “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.”

— William James

340. “The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.”

— William James

341. “The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.”

— William James

342. “The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.”

— William James

343. “Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.”

— William James

344. “Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.”

— William James

345. “If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.”

— William James

346. “Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it.”

— William James

347. “Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.”

— William James

348. “Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?”

— William James

349. “Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas.”

— William James

350. “Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.”

— William James