C. L. R. James Quotes

On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.

Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.

Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.

So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.

Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life

So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.

If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.

In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common

Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.

Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man.

To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides

The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.

The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.

The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed

The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.

The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot

To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.

To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein

To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.

Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.

If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.

... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.

Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.

Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.

I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.

Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.

The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.

New habits can be launched.

The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.

Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.

The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.

Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences

Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.

The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.

How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?

If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.

Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.

... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.

There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.

To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.

Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.

The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.

The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.