William James Quotes

Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.

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.

We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.

Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.