The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
William James
Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James
The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
William James
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.
William James
Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
William James
Life defies our phrases, it is infinitely continuous and subtle and shaded, whilst our verbal terms are discrete, rude and few.
William James
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
William James
The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own
William James
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
William James
Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
William James
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
William James
Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James