Quotes by William James

“Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.”

“Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”

“Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.”

“We dont laugh because were happy -- were happy because we laugh.”

“Tell him to live by yes and no -- yes to everything good, no to everything bad.”

“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

“Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.”

“Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things - with resignations, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope.”

The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease

Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.

The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.

We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for religious ideals.

If merely feeling good could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

Belief creates the actual fact.

It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,-that is your faith-vetoers exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.

In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.