William James Quotes - Page 12

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• If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

  William James

  Feel Good, Alcohol, Feelings

  Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) lecture 1, p. 16

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• If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.

  William James

  Life, Success, Real

  William James (1956). “The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, and Human Immortality”, p.61, Courier Corporation

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• We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

  William James

  Dog, Book, Cat

  William James (1977). “A Pluralistic Universe”, p.140, Harvard University Press

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• We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way. If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big.

  William James

  Life, Heart, People

  "Essays on Faith and Morals".

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• I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.

  William James

  Suicide, Suicidal, Men

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

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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.

  William James

  Summer, Cutting, Winter

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• First... a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

  William James

  Science, Discovery, Important

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

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• Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.

  William James

  Success, Self Esteem, Congratulations

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• We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.

  William James

  Attitude, Circumstances, Mere

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• Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.

  William James

  Opportunity, Emotional, May

  William James, Robert D Richardson (2010). “The Heart of William James”, p.112, Harvard University Press

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• The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.

  William James

  Men, Barriers, One Man

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• Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

  William James

  Mean, Thinking, Effort

  1890 The Principles of Psychology, ch.6.

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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.

  William James

  Failure, Fire, Use

  William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.1225, Library of America

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• We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.

  William James

  Sight, Disease And Death, Attention

  William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.88, Library of America

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• Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.

  William James

  History, Grease, Mind

  William James (2015). “Pragmatism and the Conception of Thruth”, p.134, William James

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• I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.

  William James

  Success, Peace, Honesty

  "Pete Seeger’s Last War" by David Hajdu, www.motherjones.com. September/October 2004.

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• I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

  William James

  Doubt, Lovers, Disorder

  "The William James Reader".

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• My experience is what I agree to attend to.

  William James

  Agree

  William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.402, Courier Corporation

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• No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.

  William James

  Teacher, Philosophy, Educational

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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.

  William James

  Science, Past, Taught Us

  William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.119, 谷月社

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• The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.

  William James

  Truth, Names, Way

  William James (2013). “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New Thought Edition - Secret Library)”, p.40, Lulu Press, Inc

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• True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience

  William James

  Truth, Names, Ideas

  William James (2013). “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New Thought Edition - Secret Library)”, p.96, Lulu Press, Inc

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• The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.

  William James

  Art, Mistake, Teaching

  William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.15, Harvard University Press

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• Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.

  William James

  War, Men, Thrill

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• One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.

  William James

  Spiritual, War, Men

  The Varieties of Religious Experience Lectures 14 - 15 (1902)

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