William James Quotes - Page 24

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The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.

William James

Mystical Experiences, Natural, Significance

William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.129, Xist Publishing

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True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.

William James

Ideas, Consistency, Quarters

William James (2015). “Pragmatism: Human Understanding”, p.75, 谷月社

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Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.

William James

Quality, Pay, Supreme

William James (1987). “Essays, Comments, and Reviews”, p.105, Harvard University Press

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If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.

William James

Law, White, Upset

William James (1986). “Essays in Psychical Research”, p.131, Harvard University Press

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[There are, in us] possibilities that take our breath away, and show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in spite of certain forms of death, death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility, of fear and wrong, death of everything that paganism, naturalism and legalism pin their trust on.

William James

Responsibility, World, Paganism

William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1982). “Essays in Religion and Morality”, p.128, Harvard University Press

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The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.

William James

Useless, Lovers, Impulse

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The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out.

William James

Teacher, Thinking, Mind

William James (2013). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.4, Courier Corporation

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I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives

William James

Truth, Believe, Ideas

William James (2012). “Pragmatism”, p.30, Courier Corporation

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However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.

William James

Cat, Night, Ideas

William James (2007). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.137, Cosimo, Inc.

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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs

William James

Truth, Air, Objectivity

William James (2000). “Pragmatism and Other Writings”, p.199, Penguin

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To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides

William James

Truth, World, Objects

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I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)

William James

Tired, Men, Biographies

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To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.

William James

Teacher, Educational, Philosophy

William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.16, Harvard University Press

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Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.

William James

Past, People, Doubt

William James (1961). “Psychology: The Briefer Course”, p.73, Courier Corporation

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Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.

William James

Philosophy, Mean, Men

William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.114, University of Illinois Press

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We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct.

William James

Teaching, Eye, Bystanders

"Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals".

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In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.

William James

Believe, Heart, Cutting

Letter to John Jay Chapman, April 5, 1897.

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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

William James

Tolls, Bells, Truth Is

William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.109, University of Illinois Press

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Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

William James

Character, Mind, World

William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1979). “Some Problems of Philosophy”, p.111, Harvard University Press

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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.

William James

Gone, Becoming, Instant

William James (1961). “Psychology: The Briefer Course”, p.147, Courier Corporation

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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.

William James

Skulls, Evil, Healthy

William James (1985). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.119, Harvard University Press

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Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.

William James

Spiritual, Children, Maturity

Dr. William James (2013). “The William James Reader”, p.482, Simon and Schuster

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The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity , with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.

William James

Breathing, White, Rights

"Essays in Radical Empiricism". Book by William James, Ch. 12 : Absolutism and Empiricism, 1912.

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It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.

William James

Mind, Different, Neighbor

"Psychology: The Briefer Course".

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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

William James

Philosophical, Eye, Reality

Dr. William James (2013). “The William James Reader”, p.429, Simon and Schuster

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Born: January 11, 1842
Died: August 26, 1910
Occupation: Philosopher
Cite this Page: Citation

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