Truth is something that happens to an idea. — William James

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it. — William James

When a thing is new, people say ‘it is not true.’ later, When its truth becomes obvious, they say ‘it is not important.’ finally, When its importance cannot be denied, they say ‘anyway, it is not new.’ — William James

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough. — William James

No bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp. — William James

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. — William James

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say. — William James

The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires. — William James

There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. — William James

I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly. — William James

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality. — William James

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. — William James

Truth is what works. — William James

A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those … truths were really there, would be an irrational rule. — William James

In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing. — William James

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

Truth in our ideas means their power to work. — William James

In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives. — William James

Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact. — William James

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. — William James

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible. — William James

Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself. — William James

Belief creates the actual fact. — William James

In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome. — William James

Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture. — William James

The belief in free–will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees. — William James

Our beliefs are really rules for action. — William James

I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE. — William James

Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. — William James

The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind…that encounters it. — William James

The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with. — William James

The mind is made up by what it feeds upon. — William James

It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor’s mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own. — William James

Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind. — William James

Good–humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile. — William James

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. — William James

To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind. — William James

Men’s activities are occupied into ways––in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy–turvy mind. — William James

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone. — William James

One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind. — William James

There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking. — William James

Intellectualism’ is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re–determining its character, for that is already given. — William James

Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other’s being but how or why, no mortal may ever know. — William James

With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved. — William James

It is your friends who make your world. — William James

Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world. — William James

Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear. — William James

Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world. — William James

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck. — William James

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that The world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist. — William James

So our self–feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. — William James

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again. — William James

Mankind’s common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. — William James

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. — William James

A stream of ideal tendency embedded in the external structure of the world. — William James

The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer––and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature’s particulars. — William James

The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence. — William James

Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world. — William James

The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world. — William James

For the moment, what we attend to is reality. — William James

To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe. — William James

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

Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise. — William James

As long as there are postmen, life will have zest. — William James

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable. — William James

Psychology is the science of mental life. — William James

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

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

Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating. — William James

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver. — William James

Man lives for science as well as bread. — William James

The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. — William James

All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits. — William James

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. — William James

Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life. — William James

The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse. — William James

We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream. — William James

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. — William James

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your Belief will help create the fact. — William James

Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness. — William James

You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind. — William James

WILLIAM JAMES QUOTES ON DIFFERENCE

T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important. — William James

There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere. — William James

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference. — William James

The difference between a good man and a bad man is The choice of cause. — William James

The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely. — William James

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause. — William James

WILLIAM JAMES QUOTES ON HUMAN BEINGS

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. — William James

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. — William James

A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity. — William James

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. — William James

Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated. — William James

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

The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation. — William James

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. — William James

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If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. — William James

We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example. — William James

Facts’ are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it. — William James

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. — William James

Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university. — William James

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self. — William James

WILLIAM JAMES QUOTES ON CHANGE

We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude. — William James

If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately. — William James

To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. — William James

Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude. — William James

If you can change your mind, you can change your life. — William James

There are 3 rules to follow if you want to change; (1) Start immediately, (2) Do it flamboyantly, (3) No exceptions. — William James

As the brain–changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream. — William James

How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds. — William James

Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny. — William James

The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away. — William James

The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change. — William James

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system. — William James