William James Quotes
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... the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.
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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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Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
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Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
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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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To begin with, our knowledge grows in spots. The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge ever grows all over... What you first gain from them is probably a small amount of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you 'line up' your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and modify to some slight degree their mass.
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Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.
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If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this.
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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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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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.
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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 essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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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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A man of sense is never discouraged by difficulties; he redoubles his industry and his diligence, he perseveres and infallibly prevails at last.
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The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.
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Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
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All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.