Quote

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

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
Come
Hours
Enough
Faith
Risking
Thing
Often
Beforehand
Life
Makes
Pessimism
Another
Optimism
True
Hour
Persons
Result
Live
Results

More quotes by 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
The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
William James
Image
I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
William James
Image
There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
William James
Image
It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
William James
Image
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
Image
We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct.
William James
Image
You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
William James
Image
A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
William James
Image
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
William James
Image
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
William James
Image
We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
William James
Image
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William James
Image
Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
William James
Image
Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.
William James
Image
I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
William James
Image
The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.
William James
Image
All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.
William James
Image
Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
William James
Image
We are mere bundles of habits.
William James