William James Quotes

Although every man believes that his decisions and resolutions involve the most multifarious factors, in reality they are mere oscillation between flight and longing.

Decision making can sometimes seem like inner civil war.

There are always two forces warring against each other within us.

It's not like you make a decision and everything inside you is 100 percent happy.

The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.

I have opinions of my own—strong opinions—but I don’t always agree with them.

It's like I have three different brains.

I had two thoughts about it. One was I could do that, and the next one was I'll never get to do that.

If your heart tells you something but your mind tells you something else, which do you believe? Both are just as apt to lie. In fact, they play at deceit all the time. Mostly they balance each other, giving us that crucial reality check. But what happens on the rare occasions when they conspire together?

...being torn apart by far too many loyalties that could not possibly live together in the same brain.

It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become irrevocable--when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon us--that tests our strength. Then, after hours of clear reasoning and firm conviction, we snatch at any sophistry that will nullify our long struggles, and bring us the defeat that we love better than victory.

Behavior is the outcome of the battle among internal systems.

It can take a surprisingly long time to get from one part of my mind to another.

Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find, for a mind maker-upper to make up his mind

Something must be done when you find an opposing set of desires of this kind well to the fore in your category of strong desires. You must set in operation a process of competition, from which one must emerge a victor and the other set be defeated.

Mere isolation in an enclosing idea is not a release from conflict.

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

There's a constant contradiction between what feels good and what feels right. But you live with decisions that you make in your life.

But what are you going to do about the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?

I don't have a belief problem, I have a focusing weakness. I focus on what's loudest instead of what feels best.

For there are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.

My religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally skeptical mind.

...and he just sat back and stared at the tube, almost interested in what was happening, trying to find the ability to believe in that lie so he could believe the one within.

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.