Top 500 William James Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.”

— William James

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— William James

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

366. “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

367. “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

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

— William James

369. “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

370. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

384. “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

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

— William James

386. “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

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

— William James

388. “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

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

— William James

390. “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

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

— William James

392. “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

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

— William James

394. “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

395. “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

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

— William James

397. “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

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

— William James

399. “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

400. “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