The Will to Believe
William JamesSözler ve Alıntılar
Hatalarımız kesinlikle o kadar da vahim şeyler değil. Tüm dikkatimize rağmen onlara maruz kalacağımızdan bu kadar emin olduğumuz bir dünyada, belli bir kalp hafifliği, onlar adına bu aşırı sinirlilikten daha sağlıklı görünüyor.
Two first steps of passion you have indeed had to admit as necessarywe must think so as to avoid dupery, and we must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take no farther passional step.
Kural olarak, kullanamadığımız tüm gerçeklere ve teorilere inanmıyoruz.
Hayattan korkma. Hayatın yaşamaya değer olduğuna inanın ve inancınız gerçeği yaratmaya yardımcı olacaktır.
Başarılı sonucunu her şeyden çok etkileyecek olan, zor bir görevin başlangıcındaki tavrımızdır.
We must always wait for sensible evidence for our beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no hypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position in abstracto. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the other would be his wisest cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is not only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because, as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involve conduct on our part.
Not the doing either of good or of evil is what nature cares for, but the knowing of them. Life is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. I am in the habit, in thinking to myself, of calling this point of view the gnostical point of view. According to it, the world is neither an optimism nor a pessimism, but a gnosticism.