William James Quotes

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the sciences to truth.

Are you a philosopher? Where's your sponge?

Philosophy is talk on a cereal box.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Philosophy … consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

My high school did not offer courses in philosophy, so the books that initially stimulated philosophical reflection in me were novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

I'm interested in philosophy, I studied it, and I also admit I try to read things that are way above me. I have a limit: I take what I need from it, and I do find that some of my favourite philosophical writings tend to be poppier. I admire smart people who are able to describe things simply or in a human, readable way.

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

The Study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

What makes philosophy so tedious is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who soughtto cure a slight hyperacidity by prescribing a carload of burned oyster-shells.

Of the opinions of philosophy I most gladly embrace those that are most solid, that is to say, most human and most our own; my opinions, in conformity with my conduct, are low and humble.

Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself.

Philosophy, having crept clinging to the rocks so far, puts out its feelers many ways in vain.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

Philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practice in this workshop; truths infinite and in harmony with infinity, in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so-called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest.

... Philosophy proper is a subject, on the one hand so hopelessly obscure, on the other so astonishingly elementary, that there knowledge hardly counts.

I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.