Top 500 William James Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

406. “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

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

— William James

409. “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

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

— William James

411. “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

412. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

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

— William James

417. “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

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

— William James

419. “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

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

— William James

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— William James

426. “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

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

— William James

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

— William James

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

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 thing is important if anyone think it important.”

— William James

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— William James

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.”

— William James

450. “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