William James Quotes

"Get but that "peace of God which passeth understanding," and the questions of the understanding will cease from puzzling and pedantic scruples be at rest.."

"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life."

"Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. which give happiness. Thomas Jefferson We never enjoy perfect happiness; our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness; some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction."

"I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing."

"Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an inhabitual way."

"If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door."

"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. But it feels like a real fight."

"The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal"

"I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human 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, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride."

"Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom."

"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."

"A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows."

"An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation."

"If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the ''as if'' technique."

"A cowboy is a man with guts and a horse."

"Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits."

"I now perceive one immense omission in my psychology -- the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated."

"Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do."

"As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors."

"To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking."