top of page
.png){kind=small}
"There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Being quotes
"Only the last two planes, I think, had any shot of being intercepted and taken down on 9/11."
"I'm not exactly an Einstein, so I compensate by being more focused."
"A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it."
"There's a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while."
"Is it a surprise that into the vessel, in which the mercury has no inclination and no repugnance, not even the slightest, to being there, it should enter and should rise in a column high enough to make equilibrium with the weight of the external air which forces it up?"
"I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth - I just hate what is being done with it."
"When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book."
Explore more quotes by William James
"Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
"I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."
"Four Characters in Consciousness-How does it go on? We notice immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing. 3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects-chooses from among them, in a word-all the while."
"Moral scepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows."
"Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them."
"Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation."
"So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience."
"Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law."
bottom of page