William James

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering
their attitudes of mind.
– William James

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.
– William James

The great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.
– William James

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
– William James

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their
prejudices.
– William James

Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the
consequences of any misfortune.
– William James

The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.
– William James

First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but
obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that
they themselves discovered it.
– William James

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

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

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
– William James

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

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
– William James

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

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
– William James

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

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

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

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
– William James

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

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

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.
– William James

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise
him.
– William James

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
– William James

Procrastination is attitude’s natural assassin. There is nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal
hanging on of an uncompleted task.
– William James

The strenuous life tastes better.
– William James

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

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
– William James

Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
– William James

If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of
it.
– William James

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often
enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result
come true.
– William James

The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although
originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods.
– William James

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
– William James

It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will
affect its successful outcome.
– William James

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with
correctness, this surely is the ideal.
– William James

All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and
health and pleasure vanish.
– William James

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

Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.
– William James

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

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

The concrete man has but one interest – to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all
means are fair which help him to it.
– William James

History is a bath of blood.
– William James

Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects
of their lives.
– William James

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

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.
– William James

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.
– William James

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

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense
of humor is just common sense, dancing.
– William James

Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.
– William James

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

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
– William James

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
– William James

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

Freedom is only necessity understood.
– William James

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

An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: “There is very little
difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.” This
distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.
– William James

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
– William James

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of
their potential being.
– William James

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

If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
– William James

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual; the impulse dies away
without the sympathy of the community.
– William James

Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we
never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never
push through the obstruction.
– William James

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
– William James

Alexander’s career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder,
made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational purpose in it, and the
moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another.
– William James

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
– William James

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

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts,
and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to
stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.
– William James

Tell him to live by yes and no – yes to everything good, no to everything bad.
– William James

If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
– William James

There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless
sentimentalist and dreamer who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion,
but who never does a manly concrete deed.
– William James

What an awful trade that of professor is – paid to talk, talk, talk! It would be an awful
universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.
– William James

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
– William James

So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing
but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind
which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the
emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and
the consequent liability to be “floored” and “rattled” in the vicissitudes of experience.
– William James

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
– William James

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

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.
– William James

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the
secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
– William James

We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.
– William James

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

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad
one is the choice of the cause.
– William James

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
– William James

If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of
it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always
willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
– William James