"My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
William James quotes (page 25 of 36)
716 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way. If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big."
Read quote
3 likes
"Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door."
Read quote
3 likes
"Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us."
Read quote
3 likes
"Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact."
Read quote
3 likes
"Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose."
Read quote
3 likes
"The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely."
Read quote
3 likes
"So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear."
Read quote
3 likes
"An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true"
Read quote
3 likes
"The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist."
Read quote
3 likes
"It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk."
Read quote
3 likes
"Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results."
Read quote
3 likes
"The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for to be true means only to perform this marriage-function."
Read quote
3 likes
"There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly."
Read quote
3 likes
"Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?"
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth"
Read quote
3 likes
"Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming."
Read quote
3 likes
"You can't out-perform your self-image."
Read quote
3 likes
"Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind."
Read quote
3 likes