Quote

The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.

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
Else
Conduct
Look
Round
Cheerfully
Nothing
Soon
Voluntary
Feel
Already
Cheerfulness
Make
Path
Occasion
Happiness
Cheerful
Speak
Spontaneous
Lost
Sovereign

More quotes by 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
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
Image
How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.
William James
Image
Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
Image
The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
William James
Image
To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
William James
Image
An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: There is very little difference between one man and another but what little there is, is very important. This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.
William James
Image
We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
William James
Image
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
William James
Image
Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
Image
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
William James
Image
The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
William James
Image
Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
William James
Image
You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
William James
Image
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
William James
Image
Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
William James
Image
Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
William James
Image
We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are given why we should not pray. Others give reasons why we should pray. Very little is said of the reason we do pray. The reason is simple: We pray because we cannot help praying.
William James
Image
The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
William James
Image
Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.
William James