William James Quotes

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

I don't know what other people are like, I haven't been able to crawl inside anybody else.

No-one but me gets into my head.

For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like.

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?

You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.

And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

Every man is an original and solitary character. None can either understand or feel the book of his own life like himself.

There are things about which I don't even talk to myself.

As small as a world as large as alone.

I like to stay cozy with my paranoia, not pass her around to my friends and family.

It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.

You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

You cannot stand anywhere in the universe that is outside of yourself.

We are all really alone. We're isolated in our own mind.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

Your life is an island separated from all other islands and continents. Regardless of how many boats you send to other shores or how many ships arrive upon your shores, you yourself are an island separated by its own pains, secluded in its happiness

If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane?

I've been living alone for so long, everything about me’s private. I’m surprised anyone’s able to understand a word I say.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

People are always separable.

Imagination is something you do alone.