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William James Quotes

1842–1910 United States

William James (11 January 1842 – 26 August 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. He developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism, and wrote influential books on the science of psychology, the psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and the philosophy of pragmatism.

United States
Critics
Non-fiction authors
Philosophers
Psychologists

Also known as: James, William

Random William James quote

173 quotes

The faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn.

The Varieties or Religious Experience (1902)

Tell him to live by yes and no — yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

The Thought and Character of William James (1935)

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

The Thought and Character of William James (1936)

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.

The Sentiment of Rationality (1882)

The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness.

Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)

Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.

The Letters of William James (1920)

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.

The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

The Thought and Character of William James (1935)

The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.

The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain — under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

Memories and Studies (1911)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: William James (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.