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Appreciation
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The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
-William James
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Attitude
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Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
-William James
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Emotions
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Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
-William James
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Experience
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Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
-William James, Principles of Psychology
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Hell
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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 fashioning our characters in the wrong way.
-William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890
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Ideas
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Often quoted in forms that correspond only loosely to Hugo's original words, for example: No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.
-William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
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Intention
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No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With good intentions, hell proverbially is paved.
http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/tt8.html
-William James, “Talks to Teachers” ch. 8 The Laws of Habit, Lectures 1892, printed 1899
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Life
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"Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact."
-William James
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"This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it."
-William James
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"The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."
-William James
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Morals
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I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monumentos of man's pride.
-William James
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Philosophy
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
-William James
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Potential
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion 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. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
-William James, [in a letter to W. Lutoslawski], May 6, 1906
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Success & Failure
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The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.
-William James, in a letter to H.G. Wells
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Universe, The
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"From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust."
-William James, Pluralistic Universe, 1901
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Books by and about William James
