Quote

Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.

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
Instinct
Mankind
Common
Reality
Always
Heroism
World
Essentially
Held
Theatre

More quotes by William James

Image
All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.
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
Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
William James
Image
Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess.
William James
Image
There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
William James
Image
An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
William James
Image
Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
William James
Image
Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
William James
Image
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
Image
The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
Image
Individuality is founded in feeling
William James
Image
There are 3 rules to follow if you want to change (1) Start immediately, (2) Do it flamboyantly, (3) No exceptions.
William James
Image
Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
William James
Image
... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
William James
Image
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.
William James
Image
Every claim creates an obligation.
William James
Image
Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
William James
Image
Time itself comes in drops.
William James
Image
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
William James
Image
But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
William James