William James
Pragmatism, psychology
Sayings by William James
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
No matter what you do, it will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
The greatest use of a life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
Our errors are not so much new and unheard of as they are old ones, dressed up in new clothes.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
The world is not a finished product, but a process, and we are part of its making.
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse of the individual withers without the sympathy of the community.
A man's character is his fate.
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable.
The more original a discoverer, the more he is apt to be regarded as a lunatic at first.
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, provided you don't keep him.
When we think of the will, we are too apt to think of it as a mysterious force, but it is nothing more than the power of attention.