Top 500 William James Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.”

— William James

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

— William James

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— William James

407. “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

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

— William James

409. “We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.”

— William James

410. “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

411. “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

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

— William James

413. “Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.”

— William James

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

— William James

415. “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

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

— William James

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “Once you accept an idea, it’s an idea whose time has come.”

— William James

421. “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

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

— William James

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.”

— William James

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

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

— William James

436. “Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.”

— William James

437. “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

438. “One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.”

— William James

439. “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

440. “The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.”

— William James

441. “Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.”

— William James

442. “Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”

— William James

443. “So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war’s disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.”

— William James

444. “No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.”

— William James

445. “The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.”

— William James

446. “Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.”

— William James

447. “You can’t out-perform your self-image.”

— William James

448. “An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true.”

— William James

449. “Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.”

— William James

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

— William James