Quotes by William James

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
--William James

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
--William James

"The great field for new discoveries," said a scientific friend to me the other day, "is always the unclassified residuum." By that curious term, he meant that around the accredited and orderly facts of every science, there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.
--William James

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
--William James

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
--William James

The solution of problems is the most characteristic and peculiar sort of voluntary thinking.
--William James

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
--William James

[Men are] so far from free... that, when a consistent and organized scheme... has once been comprehended and assimilated, a different scheme is unimaginable. No alternative... can any longer be conceived as possible.
--William James

The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts life.
--William James