William James
"Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being."
136 Quotes
"Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being."
William James
"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
"Impulse without reason is not enough and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift."
William James
"Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them."
William James
"The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful he must obey his impulse."
William James
"An idea to be suggestive must come to the individual with the force of a revelation."
William James
"An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: 'There is very little difference between one man and another but what there is is very important."
William James
"Habit is the enormous flywheel of society its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all."
William James
"As Charles Lamb says there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them."
William James
"The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgement passed on their failures by the opinion of the world."
William James
"The emotions are not always subject to reason ... but they are always subject to action. When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion action will."
William James
"Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way."
William James
"Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action."
William James
"Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies ... and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation to grow as they will by the roadside expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia."
William James
"The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy provided those ways do not assume to interfere with ours."
William James
"Faith is one of the forces by which men live the total absence of it means collapse."
William James
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