William James

“It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we est...”

“Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.”

“See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a c...”

“the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease”

“Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very conf...”

“Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.”

“There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.”

“إن بيننا وبين الله رابطة لا تنفصم، فإذا نحن أخضعنا أنفسنا لإشرافه - سبحانه وتعالى - تحققت أمنياتنا وآمالنا كلها.”

“An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.”

“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”

“we have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood”

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.”

“If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.”

“Belief creates the actual fact.”

“There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious belie...”

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”

“In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.”

“Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.”

“Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.”

“Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.”