William James

These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.

We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy.

The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of view, simply silly. From another point of view it is worse than silly, it is vile.

Fortunately, our age seems to be growing philosophical again⁠—still in the ashes live the wonted fires.

Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions.

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.

“Genius,” said Dr. Moreau, “is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree.”

Each type believes the other to be inferior to itself; but disdain in the one case is mingled with amusement, in the other it has a dash of fear.

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.

Different men find their minds more at home in very different fragments of the world.

It is like the great commutating switch-board at a central telephone station.

An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste.

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.

Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind.

Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk.

Let me repeat once more that a man’s vision is the great fact about him.

Man is born with a tendency to do more things than he has ready-made arrangements for in his nerve-centres.

"Come and let me show you how" is an incomparably better stimulus than "Go and do it as the book directs."

A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitter in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent.

His principles may be all skin and bone, but at any rate his books try to mould themselves upon the particular shape of this, particular world’s carcase.