173 quotes
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents.
The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
The Principles of Psychology (1890)
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
Collected Essays and Reviews (1920)
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
The Letters of William James (1920)
This sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without one is one of the commonest entries in conversion records.
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure.
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
The Principles of Psychology (1890)
Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
Freedom is only necessity understood.
The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)
The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
The Principles of Psychology (1890)
In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.
The Principles of Psychology (1890)
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
The Principles of Psychology (1890)
Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.
The Principles of Psychology (1890)
There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
The Will to Believe (1897)