William James Quotes About Darkness

Quotes about: Darkness

• We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.

  William James

  Islands, Sea, Roots

  "Confidences of a 'Psychical Researcher'". The American Magazine, Vol. 68, 1909.

• 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's bottom.

  William James

  Ocean, Islands, Sea

  William James (1986). “Essays in Psychical Research”, p.374, Harvard University Press

• What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.

  William James

  Life, Death, Light

  William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.153, Harvard University Press

• The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.

  William James

  Real, Night, Two

  William James (1985). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.61, Harvard University Press

• However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.

  William James

  Cat, Night, Ideas

  William James (2007). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.137, Cosimo, Inc.

• In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.

  William James

  Real, Views, Sweat

  William James (2015). “Pragmatism: Human Understanding”, p.26, 谷月社

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