William James

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all …

As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits ... A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or …

The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.

The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

Tell him to live by yes and no — yes to everything good, no to everything bad.

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed.

In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing …

There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

How you produce volume after volume the way you do is more than I can conceive. ...But you haven't to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts as I do. It is like walking through the densest brush wood.

The concrete man has but one interest — to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.

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 …

That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.