Quote

So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.

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
Feel
Anticipation
Feels
Likely
Fit
Brave
Courage
Use
Fear
Ends
Replace

More quotes by 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
Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
William James
Image
There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
William James
Image
Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
William James
Image
There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James
Image
To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
William James
Image
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
William James
Image
To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
William James
Image
It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
William James
Image
Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
William James
Image
A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
William James
Image
Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
William James
Image
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
William James
Image
Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
William James
Image
The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.
William James
Image
A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
William James
Image
Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
William James
Image
Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James
Image
We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
William James
Image
The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
William James