Top 500 William James Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

306. “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

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

— William James

308. “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

309. “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

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

— William James

311. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

314. “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

315. “If it works, it’s true.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

319. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

325. “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

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

— William James

327. “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

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

— William James

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— William James

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

348. “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

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

— William James

350. “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