Top 500 William James Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives.”

— William James

352. “Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.”

— William James

353. “He believes in No-God, and he worships him,” said a colleague of mine of a student who was manifesting a fine atheistic ardor; and the more fervent opponents of Christian doctrine have often enough shown a temper which, psychologically considered, is indistinguishable from religious zeal.”

— William James

354. “If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.”

— William James

355. “Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.”

— William James

356. “There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.”

— William James

357. “To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.”

— William James

358. “We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.”

— William James

359. “Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.”

— William James

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

— William James

361. “The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, “words, words, words,” must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.”

— William James

362. “The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.”

— William James

363. “The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.”

— William James

364. “If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”

— William James

365. “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

366. “The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.”

— William James

367. “The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed.”

— William James

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

— William James

369. “The teacher’s prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.”

— William James

370. “Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.”

— William James

371. “The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.”

— William James

372. “The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.”

— William James

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

— William James

374. “The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.”

— William James

375. “Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”

— William James

376. “We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.”

— William James

377. “The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.”

— William James

378. “All religions begin with the cry Help.”

— William James

379. “As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!”

— William James

380. “Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.”

— William James

381. “Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.”

— William James

382. “So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.”

— William James

383. “Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.”

— William James

384. “The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.”

— William James

385. “To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.”

— William James

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

— William James

387. “The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.”

— William James

388. “An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number.”

— William James

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

— William James

390. “The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.”

— William James

391. “Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.”

— William James

392. “A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple – it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent.”

— William James

393. “Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?”

— William James

394. “Men’s activities are occupied into ways – in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.”

— William James

395. “Much of what we call evil can often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer’s inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight.”

— William James

396. “Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system.”

— William James

397. “The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.”

— William James

398. “Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”

— William James

399. “At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.”

— William James

400. “A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.”

— William James