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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
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
Attempt
Harmony
Grace
Religion
Order
Things
Unseen
More quotes by William James
Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
William James
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
William James
Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
William James
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.
William James
Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
William James
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
William James
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
William James
Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
William James
The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
William James
Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
William James
The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.
William James
Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
William James
The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
William James
The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.
William James
Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
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
Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
William James
Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.
William James
