Frases de William James

„El mayor descubrimiento de mi generación es que un ser humano puede cambiar su vida cambiando su actitud mental.“

—  William James

„Se sistemáticamente ascético o heroico en cuestiones mínimas e innecesarias; haz a diario alguna cosa, lo que sea, por la sencilla razón de que preferirías no hacerla, de modo que cuando se aproxime la hora de la más nefasta necesidad no te sorprenda con nerviosismo, sin preparación para afrontar la prueba.“

—  William James

„El pesimismo conduce a la debilidad; el optimismo al poder.“

—  William James

„Cuando debemos hacer una elección y no la hacemos, esto ya es una elección.“

—  William James

„Hasta ahora se pensaba que para actuar (obrar) había que sentir. Hoy se sabe que el sentimiento aparece cuando empezamos a actuar.“

—  William James

„Si consideramos el mundo de relaciones geométricas, allí duerme el milésimo decimal de Pi, aunque jamás nadie trate de calcularlo.“

—  William James

„El camino voluntario y soberano hacia la alegría, si perdemos la alegría, consiste en proceder con alegría, actuar y hablar con alegría, como si esa alegría estuviera ya con nosotros.“

—  William James

„El principio más profundo del carácter humano es el anhelo de ser apreciado.“

—  William James

„La barrera más inamovible de la naturaleza es la que hay entre el pensamiento de un hombre y el de otro.“

—  William James

„Los decimales no calculados de pi, duermen en un misterioso reino abstracto, donde gozan de una débil realidad, hasta que no son calculados, no se convierten en algo plenamente real, e incluso entonces su realidad es mera cuestión de grado.“

—  William James

„La mejor cura para la Dipsomania (compulsion por el alcohol) es la Religiomania.“

—  William James

„La mayoría de la gente vive en un círculo muy restringido de sus posibilidades. Todos nosotros tenemos reservas de vida en las que ni siquiera soñamos.“

—  William James

„Muchas personas creen que piensan cuando en realidad sólo están reordenando sus prejuicios.“

—  William James

„Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.“

—  William James

„The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.“

—  William James

Fuente: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 22

„Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.“

—  William James

Lectures XI, XII, AND XIII : "Saintliness" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience/Lectures_XI,_XII,_and_XIII
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Contexto: One mode of emotional excitability is exceedingly important in the composition of the energetic character, from its peculiarly destructive power over inhibitions. I mean what in its lower form is mere irascibility, susceptibility to wrath, the fighting temper; and what in subtler ways manifests itself as impatience, grimness, earnestness, severity of character. Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self — it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence.

„The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles—epiphenomena“

—  William James

Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Contexto: Science... has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes... she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles—epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them; their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world's irremediable currents of events.

„The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.“

—  William James

Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Contexto: But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice — inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. … In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

„Science… has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view.“

—  William James

Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Contexto: Science... has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes... she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles—epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them; their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world's irremediable currents of events.