Quote

Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.

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
Devout
Temper
Esteem
Scientific
Almost
Religious
Facts
Neutralized
Religiousness

More quotes by William James

Image
He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
William James
Image
Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
William James
Image
What holds attention determines action.
William James
Image
No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.
William James
Image
There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
William James
Image
Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
William James
Image
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.
William James
Image
For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
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 soul is stronger than its surroundings.
William James
Image
To spend life for something which outlasts it.
William James
Image
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
William James
Image
The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.
William James
Image
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
William James
Image
Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
William James
Image
When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
William James
Image
Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
William James
Image
Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
William James
Image
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
Image
To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
William James