William James Quotes

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

Reality is a projection of consciousness, so if you believe - more than just think - but believe, subliminally, that something is true, it will become true because you will make micro-decisions based on the reality that you have faith in.

And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.

Repeat, over and over again, in case anyone forgets it or believes the contrary, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

You think the shadow is the substance.

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

I believe that a writer has to tell what they think is the truth in a human experience. The truth of the human experience cannot escape the political.

It is not to everyone's taste that truth should be pronounced pleasant. But at least let no one believe that error becomes truth when it is pronounced unpleasant.

Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.

Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.

You see, if you make believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true for you.

We live in an age rather skeptical of truth, of its existence." There is a "tendency to believe that nothing is definitive, and think that the truth is given by consent or by what we want. The question arises: does "the" truth really exist? What is "the" truth? Can we know it? Can we find it?

Reality is always kinder than your thinking.

Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.

Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.

The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.

Everyone has been a witness sometime - It doesn't change it if you don't believe.