William James Quotes on Life
William James’s Pragmatism (1907), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and the late essays “The Will to Believe” and “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” gave classical American pragmatism its most influential treatment of the practical demands of a life lived under uncertainty. The central commitment is that philosophical questions cannot be settled in abstraction from the concrete consequences for living that their answers entail — the cash value of an idea is its difference for actual experience — and the corresponding ethic of melioristic effort, openness to multiple religious and moral possibilities, and tolerance of the genuinely different ways of inhabiting the world frame James’s distinctive contribution to American philosophy. The framework grounds his parallel work in psychology (The Principles of Psychology, 1890) and the broader pragmatist tradition through Dewey, Mead, and the contemporary neopragmatist revival.
Quotes
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“Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly. -
Attributed to William James:
“Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.”
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“Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life?”
Lecture VI, Pragmatism's Conception of Truth -
Attributed to William James:
“Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they have got a second.”
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“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean' -
“I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”
Diary entry (April 30, 1870) as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James , vol. 1, p. 323; Letters of William James , vol. I, p. 147.