Quote

Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to keep by force of mere inertia.

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
Humans
Friends
Expecting
Thing
Force
Intimacy
Life
Born
Mere
Intimacies
Keep
Friendship
Roadside
Littles
Beings
Inertia
Best
Grow
Span
Little
Leave
Cultivation
Human
Grows
Friendships

More quotes by William James

Image
No decision is, in itself, a decision.
William James
Image
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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
Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man.
William James
Image
There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
William James
Image
... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
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
To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
William James
Image
'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
William James
Image
The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
William James
Image
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
Image
No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
William James
Image
...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
William James
Image
Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.
William James
Image
Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
William James
Image
What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
William James
Image
We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
William James
Image
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
William James
Image
Our beliefs are really rules for action.
William James
Image
Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
William James