Quotes by William James

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being.

Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

The unrest which keeps the never-stopping clock metaphysics going is the thought that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create that fact.

Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that ensures the successful outcome of our venture.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.

If you want a quality act as if you already had it.

The exercise of prayer in those who habitually exert it must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.

The instinct of ownership is fundamental in mans nature.

Seek out that particular mental attitude which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive along with which comes the inner voice which says This is the real me and when you have found that attitude follow it.

It is only by risking ... that we live at all.

Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.

Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for and is therefore right in postulating may be enveloped in a wider order on which she has no claim at all.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.

The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success is our national disease.

So long as the anti-militarists propose no substitute for wars disciplinary function no moral equivalent of war analogous as one might say to the mechanical equivalent of hate so long they fail to realize the full equities of the situation.

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.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.