Quote

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

William James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Ready
Call
Science
Truth
Today
Falsehood
Live
Philosophical
Life
Tomorrow
Trust

More quotes by William James

Image
The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
William James
Image
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
William James
Image
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
William James
Image
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
William James
Image
Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
William James
Image
The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James
Image
Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
William James
Image
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
William James
Image
From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (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
Image
Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
William James
Image
You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
William James
Image
A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
William James
Image
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
Image
Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
William James
Image
Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
William James
Image
... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.
William James
Image
Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.
William James
Image
A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
William James
Image
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
Image
The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed
William James