When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable.
William James
Almost Always the Same
Topic: Interfaith Pathways
“When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable.”
William James, the 19th Century philosophy and psychologist.
The Varieties of Religious Experience
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature. London: Penguin Books, 1902.
William James
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William James, Pursuit of Happiness
William James (1842-1910) was a leading philosopher and psychologist at the turn of the 19th Century. Together with Charles Sanders Pierce, James founded the philosophical school of pragmatism, which holds that the meaning of an idea is to be sought in its practical effects, that the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth is to be tested by the practical consequences of belief. While this philosophy waned for most of the 20th Century, supplanted by linguistic philosophy, it is currently enjoying a renaissance, and many contemporary philosophers are returning to James as the main inspiration for new theories of perception, meaning, and belief. James has many insights concerning happiness, chief among them the idea that happiness consists in orienting yourself to a higher purpose, even if that purpose cannot be rationally proved to exist. Those who suffer from a “crisis of meaning” emerge stronger with more enthusiasm for life than those who just go through the motions and take the easy path.
–Mark Setton [The Pursuit of Happiness website].
Additional William James Quotes
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
–William James [Is Life Worth Living? The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)].
“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”
–William James [The Will to Believe, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)] p. 10.
“Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. … But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom*. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”
–William James [“Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher'”, in The American Magazine, Vol. 68 (1909)] p. 589.
* [Often misquoted as: “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”]
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
–William James [The Pursuit of Happiness website].
“I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top.”
–William James [Letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman (7 June 1899), in The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, vol. 2, p. 90 (1926)].
“Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to “keep” by force of mere inertia.”
–William James [goodreads website].
“A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.”
–William James [goodreads website].
“Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”
–William James [goodreads website].
“The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.”
–William James [The Varieties of Religious Experience].
“Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”
-William James [The Varieties of Religious Experience].
“Through prayer, religion insists, things which cannot be realized in any other manner come about: energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free and operates in some part, be it objective or subjective, of the world of facts.”
-William James [The Varieties of Religious Experience].