William James

Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper.

Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents.

Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which every one feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority.

The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution.

It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests.

The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom.

We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history.

Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character of the hero. There was no rational purpose in it, and the moment he died his generals and governors attacked one …

History is a bath of blood.

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.

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.

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to …

I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something …

Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?

Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow 'scientific' bounds.

By being faithful in my poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true.

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

I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own.

The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet.

Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.

This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.

Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the …

Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.

The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The …