Top 500 William James Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— William James

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— William James

407. “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

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

— William James

409. “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

410. “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

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

— William James

412. “Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”

— William James

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

— William James

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414. “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

415. “It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.”

— William James

416. “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

417. “The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.”

— William James

418. “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

419. “The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.”

— William James

420. “The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.”

— William James

421. “Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world’s life.”

— William James

422. “All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.”

— William James

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

— William James

424. “The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.”

— William James

425. “An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.”

— William James

426. “The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer – and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature’s particulars.”

— William James

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427. “The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition – it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind – yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!”

— William James

428. “Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection.”

— William James

429. “I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.”

— William James

430. “True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to ‘principles,’ and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.”

— William James

431. “If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!”

— William James

432. “To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.”

— William James

433. “Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all.”

— William James

434. “A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.”

— William James

435. “The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.”

— William James

436. “We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.”

— William James

437. “The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.”

— William James

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438. “A thing is important if anyone think it important.”

— William James

439. “We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can’t tolerate.”

— William James

440. “The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.”

— William James

441. “The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.”

— William James

442. “It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.”

— William James

443. “All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.”

— William James

444. “The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.”

— William James

445. “Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.”

— William James

446. “The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested.”

— William James

447. “Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.”

— William James

448. “There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing.”

— William James

449. “A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.”

— William James

450. “The true’to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”

— William James