William James Quotes About Reality

Quotes about: Reality

• Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.

  William James

  Positive, Success, Attitude

• 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

• Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.

  William James

  Reality, Perception

• For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

  William James

  Reality, Moments

  William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.322, Courier Corporation

• Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. which give happiness. Thomas Jefferson We never enjoy perfect happiness; our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness; some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.

  William James

  Happiness, Sadness, Reality

• 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

• Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.

  William James

  Truth, Mean, Reality

  William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.99, Routledge

• 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

• Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.

  William James

  Reality, Men, Hands

  William James (1985). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.290, Harvard University Press

• There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

  William James

  Philosophical, Eye, Reality

  Dr. William James (2013). “The William James Reader”, p.429, Simon and Schuster

• Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections

  William James

  Truth, Reality, Order

  William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.86, Routledge

• Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract

  William James

  Truth, Reality, Ideas

  William James (2007). “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking”, p.128, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

• An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true

  William James

  Truth, Reality, Order

  William James (2013). “The Meaning of Truth”, p.52, Courier Corporation

• It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.

  William James

  Religious, Reality, Destiny

  William James (1985). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.394, Harvard University Press

• Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.

  William James

  Reality, Ideas, Giving

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.74, 谷月社

• When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.

  William James

  Reality, Broken, Concepts

  William James (1977). “A Pluralistic Universe”, p.116, Harvard University Press

• ... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.

  William James

  Wall, Truth, Reality

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.77, 谷月社

• Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

  William James

  Reality, Frustration, Ideas

  William James (2007). “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking”, p.128, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

• We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.

  William James

  Real, Blood, Growing

  William James (1950). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.321, Courier Corporation

• Voices of the glorified urge us onward. They who have passed from the semblances of time to the realities of eternity call upon us to advance. The rest that awaits us invites us forward. We do not pine for our rest before God wills it. We long for no inglorious rest. We are thankful rather for the invaluable training of difficulty, the loving discipline of danger and strife. Yet in the midst of it all the prospect of rest invites us heavenward. Through all, and above all, God cries, "Go forward!" "Come up higher!

  William James

  Reality, Voice, Discipline

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 564, 1895.

• There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing

  William James

  Reality, Static, Latter

• That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.

  William James

  Independent, Mean, Reality

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.27, 谷月社

• Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.

  William James

  Reality, Theatre, Heroism

  William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.123, Xist Publishing

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