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 JAMESNothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
More William James Quotes
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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 -
The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
WILLIAM JAMES -
The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
WILLIAM JAMES -
I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives
WILLIAM JAMES -
… the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Individuality is founded in feeling
WILLIAM JAMES -
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
WILLIAM JAMES -
The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
WILLIAM JAMES -
In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
WILLIAM JAMES -
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
WILLIAM JAMES -
The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
WILLIAM JAMES -
With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
WILLIAM JAMES -
When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.
WILLIAM JAMES -
New habits can be launched.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
WILLIAM JAMES -
The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
WILLIAM JAMES -
Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
WILLIAM JAMES -
Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
WILLIAM JAMES -
[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.
WILLIAM JAMES -
[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
WILLIAM JAMES -
The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
WILLIAM JAMES