William James Quotes About Virtue

Quotes about: Virtue

• I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.

  William James

  Success, Peace, Honesty

  "Pete Seeger’s Last War" by David Hajdu, www.motherjones.com. September/October 2004.

• We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

  William James

  Character, Fate, Evil

  "The Principles of Psychology". Book by William James, 1890.

• There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

  William James

  Men, Finals, Lasts

  William James (2010). “The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy”, p.208, The Floating Press

• We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.

  William James

  Character, Mean, Successful

  William James (1918). “The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2”, p.410, Courier Corporation

• We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. ... You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.

  William James

  Believe, Fighting, Fire

  William James (1985). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.284, Harvard University Press

• Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.

  William James

  Role Models, Facts, Virtue

  William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.38, Harvard University Press

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