William James Quotes
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As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
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Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
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All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
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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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Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
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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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Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
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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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Effort is a measure of a Man.
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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
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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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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
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Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?
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My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
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We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. ... You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.
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Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
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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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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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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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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.