Quotes by William James

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

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.

If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.

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.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

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

Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

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

Pure experience’ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.