William James Quotes
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The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
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If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
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General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
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One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.
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The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
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Hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he ever learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest swell, but he simply cannot buy the right things.
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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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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.
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
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The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
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You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
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The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
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An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.
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Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.