William James Quotes About Feelings

Quotes about: Feelings

• 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.

  William James

  Change, Believe, Reality

• Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions 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. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.

  William James

  Feelings, Together, Path

• One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.

  William James

  Forgiveness, Heart, Wrestling

  William James, Robert D Richardson (2010). “The Heart of William James”, p.132, Harvard University Press

• Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

  William James

  Real, Character, Feelings

  William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.124, University of Illinois Press

• Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.

  William James

  Letting Go, Giving Up, Responsibility

  William James (1985). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.95, Harvard University Press

• If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

  William James

  Feel Good, Alcohol, Feelings

  Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) lecture 1, p. 16

• Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.

  William James

  Inspirational, Feelings, Path

  "The Principles of Psychology".

• The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.

  William James

  Emotional, Feelings, Action

• Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.

  William James

  Science, Thinking, Hands

  1907 Pragmatism.

• When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.

  William James

  Reality, Men, Evil

  Dr. William James (2013). “The William James Reader”, p.369, Simon and Schuster

• It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.

  William James

  Reality, Psychology, Feelings

  William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.58, Courier Corporation

• The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

  William James

  Philosophy, Book, Mean

  Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking Lecture 1 (1907)

• There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.

  William James

  Educational, Philosophy, Feelings

  William James (2008). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.20, Nuvision Pubns

• Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.

  William James

  Mean, Men, Solitude

  William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.31, Courier Corporation

• 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.

  William James

  Stay Positive, Feelings, Together

  "The Heart of William James".

• What do believers in the Absolute mean by saving that their belief affords them comfort? They mean that since in the Absolute finite evil is ‘overruled’ already, we may, therefore, whenever we wish, treat the temporal as if it were potentially the eternal, be sure that we can trust its outcome, and, without sin, dismiss our fear and drop the worry of our finite responsibility. In short, they mean that we have a right ever and anon to take a moral holiday, to let the world wag in its own way, feeling that its issues are in better hands than ours and are none of our business.

  William James

  Holiday, Mean, Responsibility

• Individuality is founded in feeling

  William James

  Inspirational, Feelings, Individuality

  William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.124, University of Illinois 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.

• The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.

  William James

  War, Feelings, Facts

  William James (1970). “Essays in Pragmatism”, Simon and Schuster

• Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.

  William James

  Feelings, May, Determined

  William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.451, Library of America

• Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.

  William James

  Character, Sea, Feelings

  William James (1950). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.125, Courier Corporation

• Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.

  William James

  Philosophy, Mean, Men

  William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.114, University of Illinois Press

• Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.

  William James

  Feelings, Intellectual, Mind

  William James (1955). “The principles of psychology”

• To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis -beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.

  William James

  Spiritual, Religious, Feelings

  William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.14, Courier Corporation

• So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.

  William James

  Self, Feelings, World

  William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.310, Courier Corporation

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