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Quotes from The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

1842–1910 United States

← All quotes by William James

38 quotes

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)

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)

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)

The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which the world often appears to undergo.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

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)

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

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Science... has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Religion...is a man's total reaction upon life.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Attribution

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