Quote

I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.

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
Inner
Evidence
Lies
Personal
Belief
Lying
Believe
Primarily
Experiences

More quotes by William James

Image
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Image
In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.
William James
Image
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
William James
Image
In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.
William James
Image
There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
William James
Image
In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
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
It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
William James
Image
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
Image
A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
William James
Image
There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing
William James
Image
An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
William James
Image
We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
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
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
William James
Image
Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
William James
Image
We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition
William James
Image
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
William James
Image
Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
William James
Image
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
William James