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Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

William James

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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Needs
Hours
Nigh
Something
Rather
Dire
Would
Success
Test
Life
Action
Tests
May
Draws
Reason
Hour
Find
Everyday
Unnerved
Need
Stand
Untrained

More quotes by William James

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... 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
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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
William James
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History is a bath of blood.
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The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
William James
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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
William James
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
William James
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
William James
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Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
William James
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
William James
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In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.
William James
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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
William James
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Science can tell us what exists but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
William James
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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
William James
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True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
William James
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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
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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
William James
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Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.
William James
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
William James
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
William James