Quote

The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.

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
Desire
Chief
Fear
Chiefs
Corruption
Gain
Gains
Wealth
Lose
Breeders
Loses
Cowardice

More quotes by William James

Image
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
William James
Image
We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.
William James
Image
In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
William James
Image
Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.
William James
Image
Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
Image
We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
William James
Image
In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
William James
Image
What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.
William James
Image
Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
William James
Image
Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
William James
Image
Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.
William James
Image
Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
William James
Image
One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.
William James
Image
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
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
We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
William James
Image
My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
William James
Image
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
William James
Image
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
William James
Image
Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
William James