William James Quotes
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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In business for yourself, not by yourself.
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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
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Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors: the individual ... bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.
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Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.
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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
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Time itself comes in drops.
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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.
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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
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We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
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In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.
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There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing
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We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
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Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.
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It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
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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.
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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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.
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Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
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Related Authors
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Wilhelm Wundt Psychologist -
David Hume Philosopher -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
John Dewey Philosopher -
Sigmund Freud Neurologist -
Ivan Pavlov Physiologist -
Edward Thorndike Psychologist -
Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosopher -
Henri Bergson Philosopher -
Carl Rogers Psychologist -
B. F. Skinner Psychologist -
Rene Descartes Philosopher -
Carl Jung Psychiatrist -
Max Wertheimer Psychologist -
John B. Watson Psychologist -
Edmund Husserl Philosopher -
Henry James Writer -
Abraham Maslow Psychologist -
G. Stanley Hall Psychologist -
Charles Sanders Peirce Philosopher