Persons [ ] We are Half Awake | William James, 1842 – 1910

William James, Self-portrait, c 1866

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.”

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

“Man lives for science as well as bread.”

“Belief creates the actual fact.”

“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”

“Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”

“Psychology is the science of mental life.”

“The means have murdered the end.”

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

“To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.”

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure,
passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”

“There is no more miserable human being than one
in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

“If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.”

“A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”

“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”

“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”

“Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.”

“I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.”

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”

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

“In business for yourself, not by yourself.”

“Truth is what works.”

“Time itself comes in drops.”

“None of us are ever who we were yesterday.”

“Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.”

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

“Damn the Absolute!”

William James 1842-1910