William James quotes - page 12

What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden. (William James)
If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err. View quote
William James
Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which every one feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority. View quote
William James
Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary; and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. View quote
William James
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. View quote
William James
The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. View quote
William James
I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples. View quote
William James
There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. View quote
William James
I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. View quote
William James
Different men find their minds more at home in very different fragments of the world. View quote
William James
Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks? (William James)
Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. View quote
William James
The pivot round which the religious life... revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. View quote
William James
It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. View quote
William James
The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. View quote
William James
Evidently it is a pure outcome of our sense for apprehending serial increase; and, unlike the several propositions themselves which make up the series. View quote
William James
The real witness of the spirit to the second birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it has to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may even be found outside of Christianity altogether. View quote
William James
They depend on which actual path of intermediation it may functionally strike into: the word "or" names a genuine reality. View quote
William James
When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. View quote
William James
The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. View quote
William James
The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. (William James)
With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely. View quote
William James
The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest. View quote
William James
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. View quote
William James
No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events. View quote
William James