Quotes By William James

Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.

I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Belief creates the actual fact.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

Truth is what works.

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.

In business for yourself, not by yourself.

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.

The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.

We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.

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

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

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

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

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

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