William James Quotes - Page 28

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Acceptance Achievement Adversity Affection Age Alcohol Animals

It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.

William James

Reality, Psychology, Feelings

William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.58, Courier Corporation

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At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.

William James

Wise, Wisdom, Acceptance

William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.41, Courier Corporation

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If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.

William James

Men, Statistics, Claims

William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.304, Library of America

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... the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.

William James

Intellect, Shows, Effects

William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.449, Library of America

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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.

William James

Reality, Broken, Concepts

William James (1977). “A Pluralistic Universe”, p.116, Harvard University Press

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All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.

William James

Philosophy, Educational, Interesting

William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.66, Harvard University Press

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Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so may separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself.

William James

Anxiety, Experts, Saint

William James (2017). “Habit”, p.22, Read Books Ltd

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No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.

William James

Punishment, Political, Politics

William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.293, Courier Corporation

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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.

William James

Hate, Real, Thinking

William James (1993). “The Selected Letters of William James”, Anchor

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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.

William James

Ideas, Accepting, Daring

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Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

William James

Real, Character, Feelings

William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.124, University of Illinois Press

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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.

William James

Strong, Mean, Science

William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.105, Courier Corporation

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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

William James

Art, Differences, Hair

William James (2008). “The Letters of William James”, Cosimo, Inc.

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... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.

William James

Philosophy, Thinking, Would Be

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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein

William James

Truth, Hypothesis

Dr. William James (2013). “The William James Reader”, p.174, Simon and Schuster

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The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.

William James

Learning, Men, Sticks

William James (1961). “Psychology: The Briefer Course”, p.160, Courier Corporation

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Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.

William James

Mean, Cutting, Order

William James (2012). “Pragmatism”, p.41, Courier Corporation

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General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.

William James

Attitude, Details, Logic

William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.75, 谷月社

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So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.

William James

War, Long, Might

William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.308, Routledge

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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot

William James

Truth, Ideas, Verify

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking Lecture 6 (1907)

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Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.

William James

Character, Men, Thinking

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The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence.

William James

Teacher, Philosophy, Educational

William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.111, Harvard University Press

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Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.

William James

Feelings, May, Determined

William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.451, Library of America

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You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.

William James

Teacher, Philosophy, Educational

William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.108, Harvard University Press

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You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.

William James

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

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