Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Life
Science
Philanthropy
Inspirational
Marine
Death
Entrepreneur
Given
Philosophical
Giving
Charity
Outlasting
Great
Spend
Outlast
Something
Motivational
Philanthropic
Time
Use
Entrepreneurship
More quotes by William James
The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
William James
Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
William James
The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
William James
Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
William James
General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
William James
The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
William James
Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
William James
To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
William James
Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
William James
Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
William James
He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
William James
It is your friends who make your world.
William James
What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
William James
The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
William James
Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
William James
Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
William James
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
William James
Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
William James
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
William James
