William James Quotes

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. We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...' ...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling; and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated. I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one. Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows. Truth is something that happens to an idea. We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust. 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. The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence. So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man. Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind. Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas. Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up. It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods. A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description. Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge. As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate! All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits. Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa! If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly. Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference. Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. Habit is the great flywheel of society. Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated. Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality. To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.