William James Quotes
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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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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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Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.
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I will act as if I do make a difference.
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Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
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In business for yourself, not by yourself.
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Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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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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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
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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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...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
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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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'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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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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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
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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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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
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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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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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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract