William James was an American philosopher, psychologist, and physician by training who lived from January 11, 1842, to August 26, 1910. James, one of the most prominent thinkers of the late nineteenth century and one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced—some have even dubbed him the “Father of American psychology”—was the first educator in the country to offer a psychology course. Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is regarded to be one of the biggest individuals linked with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also acknowledged as one of the pioneers of the functional psychology. He was also the founder of radical empiricism, a school of philosophy.

William James Quotes

01. “Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”
― William James

02. “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
― William James

03. “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
― William James

04. “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
― William James

05. “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
― William James

06. “The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”
― William James

07. “To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.”
― William James

08. “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
― William James

09. “Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”
― William James

10. “Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me,’ and when you have found that attitude, follow it.”
― William James

11. “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
― William James

12. “If you can change your mind, you can change your life.”
― William James

13. “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
― William James

14. “The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.”
― William James

15. “Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”
― William James

16. “Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”
― William James

17. “I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.”
― William James

18. “To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds,”
― William James

19. “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.”
― William James

20. “Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.”
― William James

21. “Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.”
― William James

22. “If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.”
― William James

23. “Begin to be now what you will be hereafter. ”
― William James

24. “Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.”
― William James

25. “We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the
meaning of it all.”
― William James

26. “There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.”
― William James

27. “Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
― William James

28. “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
― William James

29. “Procrastination is attitude’s natural assassin. There’s nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task”
― William James

30. “Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to “keep” by force of mere inertia.”
― William James

31. “Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”
― William James

32. “If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”
― William James

33. “Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
― William James

34. “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”
― William James

35. “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.”
― William James

36. “Philosophy is “an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”
― William James

37. “The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.”
― William James

38. “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.
”
― William James

39. “Belief creates the actual fact.”
― William James

40. “A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”
― William James

41. “There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.”
― William James

42. “When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.”
― William James

43. “Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”
― William James

44. “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”
― WILLIAM JAMES

45. “Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction”
― William James

46. “A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.”
― William James

47. “Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
― William James

48. “If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.”
― William James

49. “Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”
― William James

50. “…do every day or two something for no other reason that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.”
― William James

51. “If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”
― William James

52. “We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead… By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.”
― William James

53. “We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition”
― William James

54. “Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”
― William James

55. “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”
― William James

56. “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.”
― William James

57. “Philosophy is “an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”
― William James

58. “The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.”
― William James

59. “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.
”
― William James

60. “Belief creates the actual fact.”
― William James

61. “Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; irritation, insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it right. (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn’t submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short as time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don’t want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make something ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what’s the matter with our self.”
― William James

62. “Why should we think upon things that are lovely Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”
― William James

63. “A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”
― William James

64. “When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.”
― William James

65. “There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.”
― William James

66. “When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.”
― William James

67. “Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”
― William James

68. “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”
― WILLIAM JAMES

69. “I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.”
― William James

70. “The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”
― William James

71. “The strenuous life tastes better”
― William James

72. “we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood”
― William James

73. “A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.”
― William James

74. “It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.”
― William James

75. “I don’t sing because I’m happy. I’m happy because I sing.”
― William James

76. “This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.”
― William James

77. “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.”
― William James

78. “It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”
― William James

79. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
― William James

80. “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?”
― William James

81. “If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”
― William James

82. “As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”
― William James

83. “A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.”
― William James

84. “Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.”
― William James

85. “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.”
― William James

86. “The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.”
― William James

87. “Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”
― William James

88. “[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.”
― William James

89. “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
― Williams James

90. “Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.”
― William James

91. “Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”
― William James

92. “Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.”
― William James

93. “All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry “Help!”
― William James

94. “The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”
― William James

95. “The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.”
― William James

96. “None of us are ever who we were yesterday.”
― William James

97. “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”
― William James

98. “The attempt at introspective analysis… is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see the darkness.”
― William James

99. “There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.”
― William James

100. “Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain”
― William James

101. “Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?”
― William James

102. “We need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.”
― William James

103. “Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.”
― William James

104. “I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man.
(from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)”
― William James

105. “Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas.”
― William James

106. “Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.”
― William James

107. “My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.”
― William James

108. “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.”
― William James

109. “I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.”
― William James

110. “The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be.”
― William James

111. “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease”
― William James

112. “our experience is what we attend to”
― William James

113. “There’s nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.”
― William James

114. “Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.”
― William James

115. “Psychology is the science of mental life”
― William James

116. “The means have murdered the end.”
― William James

117. “Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness.”
― William James

118. “These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
― William James

119. “Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.”
― William James

120. “In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.”
― William James

121. “…our moral and practical attitude….impulses, inhibitions…. how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent with the cavity of a jar…. It becomes our subconscious. [p. 287]”
― William James

122. “I will act as if what i do makes a difference.”
― William James

123. “Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second”
― William James