Home / Quotes / Quote by William James

Quote by William James

“We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.”

Quote by William James

Author

William James, born on January 11, 1842, and died on August 26, 1910, was an influential American philosopher, psychologist, and writer. He is considered one of the founders of functionalism in psychology and has had a profound impact on the fields of psychology, philosophy, and religion. more

You May Also Like

“We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. ... You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.”

Source: The Varieties of Religious Experience

“If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.”

Ifs Trying Firsts Moving Steps Risk Willing Succeed Method Assuming Charity Saint Resistance First Steps Willing To Try

Book:Writings, 1902-1910

Source: Writings, 1902-1910

“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.”

Ifs Kind Soul Prayer Divine Conversation Criticism Essence Wide Department Inward Communion

Book:The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

Source: The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

“So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.”

Long War Might Realizing Situation Moral Failing Function Heat Substitutes Propose

Book:William James: Essays and Lectures

Source: William James: Essays and Lectures

“As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

Art Certain Reading Knowing Wise Stage Being Wise

Author:William James

“Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.”

Author:William James

“I think everything is pretty well preordained - even your mistakes.”

Thinking Wells Mistake

Author:Mel Gibson

“As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”

Firsts Made Different Facts Seems Views Consciousness Wonderful Bird Strikes Flight Streams Pace

Book:The Principles of Psychology

Source: The Principles of Psychology

“Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.”

Source: Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays

“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.”

Men May Mean Philosophy Feelings Asks Individual Grows Moral Divine Solitude Organization Relation Theology Ritual Evident

Book:James and Dewey on Belief and Experience

Source: James and Dewey on Belief and Experience