William James Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

2. Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

3. An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric. Pragmatism and Other Writings

4. Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile. The Varieties of Religious Experience

5. Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve. The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1

6. Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

7. See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. Pragmatism and Other Writings

8. The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.

9. we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood

10. In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.

11. It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all. The Varieties of Religious Experience

12. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.

13. Knowledge and Love are One, and the MEASURE is suffering Varieties of Religious Experience

14. Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve. The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1

15. No! our Science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this is at least is certain: that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea.

16. Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

17. Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?

18. Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

19. Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

20. See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. Pragmatism and Other Writings

21. the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease

22. There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb. The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1

23. we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood

24. Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.

25. Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.