William James Quotes - Page 26

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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

William James

Real, Design, World

William James (2015). “Pragmatism: Human Understanding”, p.40, 谷月社

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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.

William James

Fall, Wind, Suffering

William James, Robert D Richardson (2010). “The Heart of William James”, p.111, Harvard University Press

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Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

William James

Philosophy, Mind, Should

William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.16, Xist Publishing

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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.

William James

Principles, Adequacy, Facts

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The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

William James

Philosophy, Book, Mean

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking Lecture 1 (1907)

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Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.

William James

Mean, Goal, Variables

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Choose a self and stand by it.

William James

Self

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[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.

William James

Differences, Personality, Important

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Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.

William James

Teacher, Art, Teaching

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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Regarding mutual tolerance: It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off.

William James

Happiness, Respect, Hands

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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.

William James

Way, Certain, Critics

William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.507, Courier Corporation

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...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.

William James

Karma, Buddhist, Principles

William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.213, Routledge

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Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.

William James

Letting Go, Spiritual, College

"The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature". Book by William James, 1902.

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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.

William James

Loss, College, Men

William James (1987). “Essays, Comments, and Reviews”, p.108, Harvard University Press

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The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.

William James

War, Feelings, Facts

William James (1970). “Essays in Pragmatism”, Simon and Schuster

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What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.

William James

Lonely, Men, Needs

William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1982). “Essays in Religion and Morality”, p.72, Harvard University Press

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Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.

William James

Teacher, Art, Teaching

William James (2008). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.12, Nuvision Pubns

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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.

William James

Science, Thinking, Hands

1907 Pragmatism.

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... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.

William James

Religious, Unions, Belief

William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.468, Library of America

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The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.

William James

Teacher, Art, Teaching

William James (2008). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.17, Nuvision Pubns

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Be patient and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important.

William James

Philosophy, Educational, Passion

William James (2013). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.70, Courier Corporation

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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.

William James

Philosophy, Educational, School

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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.

William James

Irrelevance, Numbers, Tables

William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.438, Courier Corporation

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Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.

William James

Facts

William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.223, Routledge

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(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some 5 or 6 score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale.

William James

Hands, Discovery, People

William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.268, Routledge

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

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