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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

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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
True
Rationalism
Thinking
Abstraction
Named
Solution
Thinks
Solutions
Habit
Oracular
Principles
Inveterate

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Belief creates the actual fact.
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
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All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride.
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A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
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Our beliefs are really rules for action.
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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.
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We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
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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.
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.
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... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
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A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
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The stream of thought flows on but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
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