William James Quotes

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.

William James

• Attention
• Made
• Aspect
• Wander

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Quotes to Explore

• My parents came to see me in a play at Eton when I was 16. And then, when I said I wanted to try for drama school, they knew there was enough passion there for them to be brave and back me.

  

  Damian Lewis
  • School
  • Parents
  • Passion

• I do not regret the part I have taken in a cause so just and interesting to mankind.

  

  Samuel Adams
  • Interesting
  • Taken
  • Regret

• As an African-American male born with a couple of strikes against you because of your skin color, I think it's very, very important to have some positive role models around, especially male influences.

  

  Omari Hardwick
  • Important
  • American
  • Couple

• I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.

  

  Barbara Walters
  • World
  • Good
  • Party

• I think Ali was a fan of mine, even though he never said it. A lot of fighters thought I was pretty good. Nobody every really spoke different on that. But a lot of fighters thought I was good so.

  

  Larry Holmes
  • Good
  • Different
  • Think

• Every human walks around with a certain kind of sadness. They may not wear it on their sleeves, but it's there if you look deep.

  

  Taraji P. Henson
  • May
  • Deep
  • Sad

• Our founders said that everybody mattered, everybody counted. But we all know that they didn't count everybody at the beginning. They did somehow have confidence that each generation of Americans would do a better job with it and would bring more and more people in from the margins and into the heart and soul of our democracy.

  

  Maggie Hassan
  • People
  • Heart
  • Job

• My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn't want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the stories, too.

  

  Natalie Babbitt
  • Writing
  • Book
  • Husband

• I like to read in the bathtub. Ideally, that bathtub would be located on a small Greek island.

  

  Adam Mansbach
  • Small
  • Like
  • Greek

• I grew up in a culturally radical home, where strong emotions were forbidden.

  

  Lars von Trier
  • Up
  • Home
  • Strong

• I was shocked when I heard that Farghadani had been sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison on spurious charges, as Amnesty International notes, of 'spreading propaganda against the system,' 'insulting members of the parliament through paintings' and 'insulting the Supreme Leader' with her cartoon.

  

  Nazanin Boniadi
  • Leader
  • Prison
  • Propaganda

• I love getting people's opinion of what I'm doing.

  

  Patricia Riggen
  • People
  • Opinion
  • Doing

• The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?

  

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • Poetry
  • Philosophical
  • Then

• A woman should have the right to carry a gun.

  

  Vicky Hartzler
  • Woman
  • Right
  • Gun

• Whether we're Democrats or Republicans or independents, we have to learn to hang together or we're gonna hang separately.

  

  Parker Palmer
  • Together
  • Learn
  • Democrats

• High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.

  

  Camille Paglia
  • Nature
  • High
  • Struggle

• The southern colonists were not preoccupied with their own historical significance and mostly did not bother even to make the records of births, marriages, and deaths that they required of themselves by law. Nor did they write accounts of what they were up to for the benefit of posterity.

  

  Edmund Morgan
  • Up
  • Law
  • Own

• It's always hard to deal with injuries mentally, but I like to think about it as a new beginning. I can't change what happened, so the focus needs to go toward healing and coming back stronger than before.

  

  Carli Lloyd
  • Change
  • Focus
  • Beginning

• I try to keep my life low key, and I don't like going to parties unless they're thrown by a friend of mine, or they're to do with a project I'm in, or it's because I've been nominated for an award.

  

  James McAvoy
  • Life
  • Friend

• Um, well my main profession is acting and music is what I love doing. It's kind of nice like that in a way because it means I'm under no real pressure with the music. I have got complete creative control and I can make whatever I want. So, that takes a lot of the pressures off because there's no financial pressure. And it's something I've always loved doing.

  

  Iwan Rheon
  • Control
  • Pressure
  • Profession

• During the first million years of its existence, mankind survived five apocalypses without succumbing to extinction. It endured the Apocalypse of Steel, the Apocalypse of Hydrogen, the Apocalypse of Serotonin, and both Apocalypses of Water, the second of which occurred despite certain contracts to the contrary.

  

  Rachel Swirsky
  • Water
  • First
  • Existence

• Controversies are part and parcel of making a big film.

  

  Vijay
  • Film
  • Big
  • Parcel

• In the past, it wasn't any big deal for people with talent to hang out together. Now we have the celebrity age, which has made a lot of things harder to do.

  

  Leo Sayer
  • People
  • Together
  • Made

• 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.

  

  William James
  • Attention
  • Made
  • Aspect