William James Quotes - Page 26

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True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.

William James

Ideas, Consistency, Quarters

William James (2015). “Pragmatism: Human Understanding”, p.75, 谷月社

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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs

William James

Truth, Air, Objectivity

William James (2000). “Pragmatism and Other Writings”, p.199, Penguin

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However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.

William James

Cat, Night, Ideas

William James (2007). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.137, Cosimo, Inc.

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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

William James

Happiness, Contradiction, Natural

William James, Robert D Richardson (2010). “The Heart of William James”, p.219, Harvard University Press

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Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.

William James

Philosophy, Educational, Thinking

William James, Robert D Richardson (2010). “The Heart of William James”, p.127, Harvard University Press

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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

Prayer, Essence, Soul

William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.151, Xist Publishing

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The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity , with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.

William James

Breathing, White, Rights

"Essays in Radical Empiricism". Book by William James, Ch. 12 : Absolutism and Empiricism, 1912.

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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.

William James

Men, Lines, Certain

William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.291, Courier Corporation

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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.

William James

Sight, Perspective, Shifting

Dr. William James (2013). “The William James Reader”, p.102, Simon and Schuster

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Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.

William James

Philosophy, Mean, Men

William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.114, University of Illinois Press

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To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.

William James

Teacher, Educational, Philosophy

William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.16, Harvard University Press

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Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?

William James

Religious, Order, Doe

William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.24, Courier Corporation

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Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

William James

Philosophy, Mind, Should

William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.16, Xist Publishing

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Lets take full advantage of this discovery

William James

Encouragement, Discovery, Advantage

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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

William James

Real, Design, World

William James (2015). “Pragmatism: Human Understanding”, p.40, 谷月社

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The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

William James

Philosophy, Book, Mean

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking Lecture 1 (1907)

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Choose a self and stand by it.

William James

Self

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Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.

William James

Mean, Goal, Variables

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[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.

William James

Differences, Personality, Important

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Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.

William James

Teacher, Art, Teaching

William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.16, Harvard University Press

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Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off.

William James

Happiness, Respect, Hands

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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.

William James

Way, Certain, Critics

William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.507, Courier Corporation

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...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.

William James

Karma, Buddhist, Principles

William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.213, Routledge

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Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.

William James

Letting Go, Spiritual, College

"The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature". Book by William James, 1902.

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What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.

William James

Lonely, Men, Needs

William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1982). “Essays in Religion and Morality”, p.72, Harvard University Press

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Born: January 11, 1842
Died: August 26, 1910
Occupation: Philosopher
Cite this Page: Citation

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