
"Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. The whole defence of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief."
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"In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't."

"Believe in the hope of your Life Illusion because this is the only real thing that you posses!"

"Religion is treasured when it brings goodness out of a person."

"I still believe in miracles, because being alive is a miracle on its own."

"If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!"

"Finally, let them recognise that there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him."

"Prayer is a confession of one's own unworthiness and weakness."
Explore more quotes by William James


"It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again."


"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."


"A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house."


"The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments."


"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."

