Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.

WILLIAM JAMES, Principles of Psychology

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.

WILLIAM JAMES, Lecture XX, "Conclusions," The Varieties of Religious Experience

History is a bath of blood.

WILLIAM JAMES, The Moral Equivalent of War

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.

WILLIAM JAMES, A Pluralistic Universe

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain — under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

WILLIAM JAMES, "The Social Value of the College-Bred," Memories and Studies

A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.

WILLIAM JAMES, Lectures XI, XII, and XIII, "Saintliness," The Varieties of Religious Experience

I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

WILLIAM JAMES, Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness," The Varieties of Religious Experience

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

WILLIAM JAMES, "Clifford's Lectures and Essays," Collected Essays and Reviews

Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anesthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he also is afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it - so importantly - is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way.

WILLIAM JAMES, "What Makes Life Significant?", Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideas

An employer of labor who should see to it that each man and woman working for him got a solid month of holiday in the course of the year, would, we feel convinced, make money by it in the long run; for there is hardly an occupation, from sawing wood to writing poetry, in which the mental state of the workman does not influence the result; and wherever the mental factor exists the man will do more and better work in eleven months than in twelve.

WILLIAM JAMES, "Vacations", Essays, Comments, and Reviews

Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.

WILLIAM JAMES, attributed, Worth Repeating

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.

WILLIAM JAMES, Lecture V, "Pragmatism and Common Sense," Pragmatism

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

WILLIAM JAMES, Lectures VI and VII, "The Sick Soul," The Varieties of Religious Experience

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

WILLIAM JAMES, letter to W. Lutoslawski, May 6, 1906

Our ceaseless scheming for the future has undermined for us all sense of reality in the present. We cannot rest with the present alone for our object. The fact is that every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in the year, whether he feel like taking it or not. First, for the reason we have considered hitherto--that that capacity for irresponsible enjoyment which is like air space in the character, may not become wholly atrophied within him--though many cannot and many will not treat this as a "practical" reason. But second, for the reason that all must consider practical, namely, tone of mind and health of body. No man, were he composed of catgut and whalebone, can work for five years unremittingly at the same kind of work with impunity.

WILLIAM JAMES, "Vacations", Essays, Comments, and Reviews

I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.... I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.

WILLIAM JAMES, "The Moral Equivalent of War"

Freedom is only necessity understood.

WILLIAM JAMES, "The Dilemma of Determinism"

Immortality is one of the great spiritual needs of man. The churches have constituted themselves the official guardians of the need, with the result that some of them actually pretend to accord or to withhold it from the individual by their conventional sacraments.

WILLIAM JAMES, The Will to Believe and Human Immortality

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.

WILLIAM JAMES, The Sentiment of Rationality

When one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be ... the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.

WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience

In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible. It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

WILLIAM JAMES, The Moral Equivalent of War