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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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can… . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the ore our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
—William James
Topics: Habits, Habit, Usefullness
Act the part and you will become the part.
—William James
Topics: Act
Act as though what you do makes a difference. It does.
—William James
Topics: Act, Helping, Doing Your Best, Action, Kindness
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
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
In the dim background of our mind, we know what we ought to be doing, but somehow we cannot start. Every moment, we expect the spell to break, but it continues, pulse after pulse, and we float with it.
—William James
Topics: Doing
Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives f or is thrill and excitements … From time immemorial war has been … the supremely thrilling excitement.
—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
Belief creates the actual fact.
—William James
Topics: Belief
Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
—William James
Topics: Emotions, Instincts
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
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
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: Teamwork, Teams, Potential, Possibilities
Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
—William James
Topics: Doing Your Best
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
Topics: Positive Attitudes, Mind, Live, Attitude, Optimism, Great, Discover
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
—William James
Topics: Truth
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
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
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: Philosophers, Philosophy
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
Faith is one of the forces by which men live; the total absence of it means collapse.
—William James
Topics: Faith, Belief
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
—William James
Topics: The Universe, Universe
There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true self.
—William James
Topics: Fail, Faith, Failure
If this life be 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.
—William James
Topics: Life, Choice
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
Topics: Knowledge
To spend life for something which outlasts it.
—William James
Topics: Achievement, Success & Failure
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: Friendship, Friends
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. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.
—William James
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol
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
Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
—William James
Topics: Holidays
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
—William James
Topics: Potential
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
—William James
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
To make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy … we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.
—William James
Topics: Habit
What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise—although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
—William James
Topics: Praise
Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
—William James
Topics: Thinking
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
Topics: Science
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
Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer’s inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its string can so often depart and turn into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it…
—William James
Topics: Bravery
To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
—William James
Topics: Faith
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