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At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.

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
Wise
Wisdom
Religion
Universe
Whole
Manner
Acceptance
Bottom
Concern

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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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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'
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
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Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
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The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
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The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
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To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.
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Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
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We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.
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True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
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