William James Quotes
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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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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
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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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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
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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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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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As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
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On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
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My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
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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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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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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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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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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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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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A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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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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The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.