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William James : Philosophical insights

Dernière mise à jour : 14 mai 2023


William James (1842-1910)



Quotations




Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.


Writings, 1902-1910


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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.


Writings, 1902-1910

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Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.


A pluralistic universe


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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

The Principles of Psychology

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The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.


Collected Essays and Reviews


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Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.


Essays on Faith and Morals


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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.


Selected Papers on Philosophy


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Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self.

The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us — they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle.


The Varieties of Religious Experience