William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist. He is considered one of America’s most prominent philosophers and one of the great psychologists of all time. He was the brother of the author Henry James.
Born in New York City, James studied art and then got a medical degree from Harvard. He never practiced as a doctor—instead, he established himself as a member of the Harvard faculty teaching anatomy and physiology, and later psychology and philosophy. In 1872, James together with Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Chauncey Wright, and other Harvard intellectuals from the law, medicine, philosophy, and other academic disciplines started a philosophical discussion group called the Metaphysical Club.
James’s most significant contribution to philosophy is the idea of pragmatism—it purported that knowledge is only meaningful when coupled with action. In other words, the practical outcome of an idea is more valuable than the idea itself. James sought a functional definition of truth and described truth as not an abstract idea. The truth of a proposition can be judged only by practical, concrete results; James said, “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons.”
In psychology, James is credited with introducing the concept of the “stream of consciousness” to describe how an individual’s perceptions, thoughts, memories, sensations, and reactions to events are perceived as a continuous flow. James wrote, “Consciousness … does not appear to itself chopped up in bits … a ‘river’ or ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.”
James’s most famous works are The Principles of Psychology (1890) and Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902.) The latter laid the foundation of the study of the psychology of religion; it influenced various intellectuals—-from the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung to the novelist Aldous Huxley. Varieties of Religious Experience has been hailed as one of the best non-fiction books of the twentieth century.
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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
Topics: Success, Success & Failure
Footnotes—little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
—William James
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.
—William James
Topics: Love, Ideas
The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.
—William James
Topics: Prayer
Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
—William James
Topics: Thinking
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their “agreement,” as falsity means their disagreement, with “reality”.
—William James
Topics: Reality
Habit is second nature, or rather, ten times nature.
—William James
Topics: Habits
We don’t laugh because we’re happy—we’re happy because we laugh.
—William James
Topics: Laughter
Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, 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 inertia.
—William James
Topics: Friends, Friendship
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
—William James
Topics: Philosophy
The emotions are not always subject to reason … but they are always subject to action. When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
—William James
Topics: Secrets of Success
Faith is one of the forces by which men live; the total absence of it means collapse.
—William James
Topics: Belief, Faith
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
—William James
Topics: Habit, Indecision, Decision, Decisions
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second. Give your dreams all you’ve got and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
—William James
Topics: Perseverance, Dream, Dreams, Energy, Persistence, People, Give, Win
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
—William James
Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
—William James
Topics: Despair
We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
—William James
Topics: Society
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
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
Topics: Philosophy
Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
—William James
Topics: Reason, Instincts
It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
—William James
Topics: Character
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
—William James
Topics: Psychiatry
The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
—William James
Topics: Immortality, Existence
He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
—William James
Topics: Opportunity
Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
—William James
Topics: Faith
Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call fourth. … Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. … Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives fare within his limits he possesses powers of various sorts he habitually fails to use.
—William James
Topics: Potential, Doing Your Best, Possibilities
What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
—William James
Topics: Bravery
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
—William James
Topics: Meaning, Purpose
Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is “All striving is vain,” will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.
—William James
Topics: Freedom
I have often thought the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “This is the real me!”.
—William James
Topics: Character
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
—William James
Topics: Success
From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreignness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.
—William James
Topics: The Universe
To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
—William James
Topics: Faith
The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.
—William James
Topics: Hell, Character
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
Topics: Attitude, Conflict
In the practical as in the theoretic life, the man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing, whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
—William James
Topics: Accomplishment, Wealth
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
Topics: Teams, Potential, Teamwork, Possibilities
Men habitually use only a small part of the powers which they possess and which they might use under appropriate circumstances.
—William James
Topics: Difficulties, Adversity
Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.
—William James
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
—William James
Topics: Truth
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