William James Quotes

You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don’t dream about.

‘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.

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second.

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

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.

Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.

The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.

It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.

If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

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.

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.