William James Quotes

When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.

Man is the measure of all things.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it.

There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.

Life is bigger than cinema. Cinema is just a part of life, so I never take success or failure seriously.

Philosophy is altogether less pure now. It's been impurified by science and social science and history.

Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.

Years ago, I was crashed in gram’s garden and Big asked me what I was doing. I told him I was looking up at the sky. He said, “That’s a misconception, Lennie, the sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.

I think if we could turn the dial a bit, and try to take what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called "the point of view of the universe", and look from above, and realize that we are not special, none of us are, I think it would just cause a transformation.

Humanism is not wrong in its cry for sociological healing, but humanism is not producing it.

Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action. As long as you gotta sit-down philosophy, you’ll have a sit-down thought pattern, and as long as you think that old sit-down thought you’ll be in some kind of sit-down action.

Remember this maxim: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. The way you perceive things is an extremely powerful tool that will allow you to fully bring the power of intention into your life.

Things don't change. You change your way of looking, that's all

I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing.

Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).

New ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope revealed quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite. But turn the question around: Do new things make for new ways of seeing?

What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.

Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.

An idea or an insight doesn't come from a single happening, it requires a meeting to alter a perspective. Often it takes a while for the events to collide, but when they do it is inevitable that a change will follow.

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.

Why change the world? Change worlds!

Do not say hypothesis, and even less theory: say way of thinking.

There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect... What is philosophy today... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?