William James Quotes

The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

William James

• Mind
• Science
• Attention
• Progress

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Quotes to Explore

• Republicans rarely criticize Obama for lack of empathy - in part because liberals have traditionally been seen as standing up for the weak and the vulnerable. Conservatives can be just as empathetic. But they believe that, in most cases, it's not government's role to be the primary dispenser of empathy.

  

  Gary Bauer
  • Up
  • Believe
  • Government

• General Giap was one of the most brilliant military strategists of our era, who in Dien Bien Phu was able to place missile launchers in remote, mountainous jungles, something the yankee and European military officers considered impossible.

  

  Fidel Castro
  • Military
  • Place
  • Impossible

• Up until the end of the Bush Administration, there was indifference to the North Korean suffering under Kim Jong-Il.

  

  Ed Royce
  • Up
  • Suffering
  • End

• I build community. However, I do it wearing a number of hats.

  

  Cameron Sinclair
  • Community
  • Build
  • Hats

• I love to be with my son and my grandchildren, like normal people. I have no particular idea of what I represent to other people. It's very mysterious to me. I don't understand it.

  

  Omar Sharif
  • People
  • Love
  • Son

• Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.

  

  Edmund Burke
  • Free
  • Justice
  • Trade

• I think if I heard someone else talking about their life, describing all the problems I've had, they'd look like they were through. Done. But there's something about me - I'm smiling. Those things are really not bad enough to put me in a slump. I'm smiling with the opportunity to wake up every morning.

  

  Nas
  • Life
  • Up
  • Done

• Brandon Boyd of Incubus is hot, but he's too pretty.

  

  Rachel Perry
  • Pretty
  • Hot
  • Too

• I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.

  

  N. Scott Momaday
  • Land
  • Landscape
  • Isolation

• When I was 13, I started working in a nightclub with Ray Charles. That's the greatest school in the world, the school of the streets. Ray taught me how to read in Braille. He was only two years older than me, but it was like he was 100 years older.

  

  Quincy Jones
  • World
  • School
  • Greatest

• The older you get, the more comfortable you become with yourself, and you accept what you have physically.

  

  Victoria Beckham Spice Girls
  • You
  • Yourself
  • Accept

• It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.

  

  Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
  • Up
  • May
  • More

• I told my agent which women I aspire to have a career like: Frances McDormand, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney and Emma Thompson - character actresses who have something to say. I also said that I loved Madeline Kahn and Jessica Lange.

  

  Rachael Harris
  • Women
  • Character
  • Career

• What has history said of eminence without honor, wealth without wisdom, power and possessions without principle? The answer is reiterated in the overthrow of the mightiest empires of ancient times. Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome! The four successive, universal powers of the past. What and where are they?

  

  Orson F. Whitney
  • Power
  • History
  • Past

• If I'm so popular, why did they replace me with Tommy Thayer?

  

  Ace Frehley Kiss
  • Why
  • Me
  • Popular

• I would love to work with Matt Damon.

  

  Idina Menzel
  • Work
  • Love
  • Would

• I don't know anyone who likes the American League games better. Maybe some fans do. But if you're not an actual DH, you probably prefer the National League.

  

  Zack Greinke
  • American
  • Know
  • Better

• To compare Olympic sport with cricket would not be fair. Years back, cricket was a sport only for the classes, and we will also have to make other sports masses from classes like cricket.

  

  Gagan Narang
  • Sports
  • Years
  • Cricket

• I loved working with Mandy Patinkin, I have to say.

  

  David Harewood

• A beam of light takes about two million years to reach from us to the Andromeda nebula. But my thought covers this distance in a few seconds. Perhaps some day some intermediate form of body and mind may permit us to say that we actually can travel faster than light.

  

  Ragnar Frisch
  • Mind
  • May
  • Light

• In this world, progress is for our descendants alone. They will have more of a chance than we did. All the beautiful things ever seen on our world have, of course, already been seen—are being seen at this instant and will always be seen—by our descendants, and by their doubles who have preceded and will follow them. Scions of a finer humanity, they have already mocked and reviled our existence on dead worlds, while overtaking and succeeding us. They continue to scorn us on the living worlds from which we have disappeared, and their contempt for us will have no end on the worlds to come.

  

  Eliot Weinberger
  • Progress
  • Existence
  • Disappeared

• Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.

  

  Dennis Prager
  • People
  • Free
  • Selfish

• As mayor, I've traveled to China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Mexico to meet with heads of state and business leaders to promote trade with L.A. companies and through L.A.'s seaports and airports - because that generates L.A. jobs.

  

  Eric Garcetti
  • Business
  • Jobs
  • Companies

• The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

  

  William James
  • Mind
  • Science
  • Attention