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 God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgerfleflt passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
—William James
Topics: Faith, God, Divinity
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
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
—William James
Topics: Belief
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
—William James
Topics: Friendship, Happiness
Most men’s friendships are too inarticulate.
—William James
Topics: Friendship
To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being.
—William James
Topics: Awareness
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.
—William James
Topics: Effort
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
—William James
Topics: Truth
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
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
For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
—William James
Topics: Morals, Morality
Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
—William James
Topics: To Be Born Everyday, Habit, Genius, Creativity
Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
—William James
Topics: Wisdom
Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
—William James
Topics: Experience
When you live your life with an appreciation of coincidences and their meanings, you connect with the underlying field of infinite possibilities.
—William James
Topics: Living Well
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
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitativeness.
—William James
Topics: Imitation, Role models
Man, biologically considered, and whatever else he may be into the bargain, is the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and indeed, the only one who preys systematically on his own species.
—William James
Topics: Man
He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
—William James
Topics: Opportunity
Events are influenced by our very great desires.
—William James
Topics: Events, Desires, Desire
We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.
—William James
Topics: Anger
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
If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
—William James
Topics: Desire, Desires
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
—William James
Topics: Helping, Aspirations, Meaning, Goals, Purpose, Living, Life
It is only by risking … that we live at all.
—William James
Topics: Danger, Risk
Success plus self-esteem equals pretensions.
—William James
Topics: Identity
To spend life for something which outlasts it.
—William James
Topics: Achievement, Success & Failure
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
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
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
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