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Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
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
Lower
Fitful
Acts
Momentous
Critical
Destinies
Destiny
Determining
Higher
Voluntary
Attending
Brief
Nevertheless
More quotes by William James
Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.
William James
Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.
William James
You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.
William James
A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.
William James
If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James
To change one's life: a. Start immediately b. B. Do it flamboyantly c. No exceptions Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted.
William James
Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
William James
I don't sing because I'm happy I'm happy because I sing.
William James
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
We can act as if there were a God feel as if we were free consider Nature as if she were full of special designs lay plans as if we were to be immortal and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
William James
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.
William James
Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
William James
Habit is the great flywheel of society.
William James
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
The perfection of rottenness.
William James
In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.
William James
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
William James
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
William James
Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
William James
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
William James
