William James Quotes

Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.

William James

• Literature
• Philosophy
• Consciousness
• Educational

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Quotes to Explore

• Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.

  

  A. B. Yehoshua
  • Literature
  • Understand
  • Gold

• The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.

  

  Naguib Mahfouz
  • People
  • World
  • Believe

• What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

  

  E. M. Forster
  • Great
  • Man
  • Literature

• Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.

  

  Tayari Jones
  • Literature
  • Secret
  • Western

• I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.

  

  Rabih Alameddine
  • Great
  • Taken
  • Literature

• I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

  

  V. S. Naipaul
  • Friends
  • Man
  • Nice

• I'm always looking for something new: a new inspiration, a new philosophy, a new way to look at something, new talent.

  

  Madonna Breakfast Club
  • Inspiration
  • Philosophy
  • Look

• Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

  

  Carl Clinton Van Doren
  • Service
  • Literature
  • Adventure

• The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

  

  Nathan Myhrvold
  • Great
  • Girl
  • Boy

• I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.

  

  Hans-Ulrich Obrist
  • Time
  • Music
  • Science

• Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.

  

  Walter Kirn
  • Real
  • Age
  • Feeling

• Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

  

  Karl Jaspers
  • Philosophy
  • Only
  • Concrete

• Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

  

  Karen Thompson Walker
  • Life
  • Great
  • Important

• As a matter of personal philosophy, I have generally said, 'Why not?' far more often than either 'Why?' or 'Not.'

  

  Rachel Sklar
  • Why
  • Philosophy
  • Said

• My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

  

  Karl Kraus
  • More
  • Consciousness
  • His

• When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.

  

  S. Ansky
  • Work
  • Literature
  • Jews

• Chinatown is tremendously interesting... It's a part of the city that hasn't really been explored in crime literature or in any general literature. It's as though Chinatown didn't exist. People write about New York without mentioning Chinatown at all.

  

  S. J. Rozan
  • People
  • Interesting
  • City

• I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien's legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.

  

  Samantha Shannon
  • World
  • Love
  • English

• For everyone who, having no artistic sense-that is to say, no submission to subjective reality-may have the knack of reasoning about art till doomsday, especially if he be, in addition, a diplomat or financier in contact with the 'realities' of the present day, is only too ready to believe literature is an intellectual game which is destined to gradually be abandoned as time goes on.

  

  Marcel Proust
  • Reality
  • Literature
  • Artistic

• The unconscious is our best collaborator.

  

  Mike Nichols
  • Consciousness
  • Unconscious
  • Collaborators

• I went a little nuts in my twenties, but I just turned thirty and I feel, like, older now.

  

  Sunny Mabrey
  • Feel
  • Older
  • Nuts

• Yet who shall shut out Fate?

  

  Edwin Arnold
  • Fate

• Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.

  

  William James
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  • Consciousness