Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by William James (American Philosopher)

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.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William James

One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.
—William James
Topics: Feelings

Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that insures the successful outcome of our venture.
—William James
Topics: Optimism, Positive Attitudes

To change your life: start immediately; do it flamboyantly; no exceptions.
—William James
Topics: Life, Change

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation.
—William James
Topics: Education

Act as though what you do makes a difference. It does.
—William James
Topics: Doing Your Best, Kindness, Action, Helping, Act

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

Do something everyday for no other reason than 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
Topics: Effort, Action

Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world’s demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.
—William James
Topics: Failure

The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.
—William James
Topics: Instincts

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
Topics: Humor, Dance

It is only by risking … that we live at all.
—William James
Topics: Danger, Risk

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
—William James
Topics: Faith

Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
—William James
Topics: Doing Your Best

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.
—William James
Topics: Thought

The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but, whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.
—William James
Topics: Manners

If merely “feeling good” could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
—William James
Topics: Alcohol, Alcoholism

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

Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
—William James
Topics: Facts

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
—William James
Topics: Procrastination, Work

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 monumentos of man’s pride.
—William James
Topics: Morals, Pride

To kill time is not murder, it’s suicide.
—William James

The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
—William James
Topics: Experience, Memory

There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
—William James
Topics: Evil

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
—William James
Topics: Change, Truth

Events are influenced by our very great desires.
—William James
Topics: Desires, Events, Desire

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
Topics: Reason, Action

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
Topics: Thoughts, Thought, Thinking

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely “understandable” world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong.
—William James
Topics: Idealism

If a man’s good for nothing else, he can at least teach philosophy.
—William James
Topics: Philosophy

The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.
—William James
Topics: Sadness, Unhappiness

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