Top 500 William James Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— William James

304. “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

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

— William James

306. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

309. “Of course we measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice until itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth.”

— William James

310. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— William James

312. “Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.”

— William James

Featured in: Strong Quotes

313. “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

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

— William James

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— William James

316. “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

317. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

320. “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

321. “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

322. “If it works, it’s true.”

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

327. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— William James

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

336. “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

337. “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

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

— William James

339. “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

340. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

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

— William James

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

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

— William James