"Touch is the alpha and omega of affection."
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Quote collection
William James quotes (page 14 of 36)
716 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly."
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"A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind."
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"Instinct leads, logic does but follow."
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"The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons."
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"A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows."
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"All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits."
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"The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths."
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"My experience is what I agree to attend to."
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"It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again."
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"The perfection of rottenness."
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"How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure."
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"An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible."
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"To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt."
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"One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible."
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"Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation."
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"Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies."
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"We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not."
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"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."
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"How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender."
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