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 JAMESI 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 JAMESFacts’ are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
WILLIAM JAMESIt is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
WILLIAM JAMESEffort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
WILLIAM JAMESA chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
WILLIAM JAMESThe intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
WILLIAM JAMESThe prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
WILLIAM JAMESPretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
WILLIAM JAMESThe mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
WILLIAM JAMESA man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
WILLIAM JAMESGenius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
WILLIAM JAMESOur beliefs are really rules for action.
WILLIAM JAMESThe union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
WILLIAM JAMESOne of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.
WILLIAM JAMESTo some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
WILLIAM JAMESTruth happens to an idea
WILLIAM JAMES