William James Quotes - Page 22

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Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.

William James

Morning, Lying, Night

William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.48, Harvard University Press

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Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.

William James

Race, Two, Legs

William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.39, Harvard University Press

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What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.

William James

Zest, Needs, Done

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

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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.

William James

Science, Self, Brain

William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.146, Courier Corporation

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We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.

William James

Thinking, Function, Intellect

Dr. William James (2013). “The William James Reader”, p.669, Simon and Schuster

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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

William James

Freedom, Age, Understood

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

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From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.

William James

Teacher, Children, Philosophy

William James (1907). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”

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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

William James

Science, Law, Together

William James (1986). “Essays in Psychical Research”, p.101, Harvard University Press

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It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.

William James

Religious, Reality, Destiny

William James (1985). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.394, Harvard University Press

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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.

William James

Reality, Ideas, Giving

William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.74, 谷月社

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There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

William James

Religious, Attitude, Snickers

William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.42, Booklassic

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Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mentalfire.

William James

Real, Fire, Water

William James (1912). “Essays in Radical Empiricism”

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It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.

William James

Political, Politics, Natural

William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.11, Library of America

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The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.

William James

Speak, Reaching, Ends

William James (2003). “Essays in Radical Empiricism”, p.33, Courier Corporation

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An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.

William James

Doctors, Favors, Patient

William James (1987). “Essays, Comments, and Reviews”, p.57, Harvard University Press

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The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.

William James

Fields, All Time, Instant

William James (1976). “Essays in Radical Empiricism”, p.13, Harvard University Press

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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.

William James

Faith, Hypothesis

William James (1956). “The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, and Human Immortality”, p.95, Courier Corporation

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Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.

William James

Faith, Religious, Loss

William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.107, University of Illinois Press

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In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.

William James

Philosophy, Educational, Order

William James (1983). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.89, Harvard University Press

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All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.

William James

Happiness, Pain, Routine

William James (1918). “The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2”, p.553, Courier Corporation

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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.

William James

Plato, Philosophy, Slumber

William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.60, Routledge

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Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

William James

Science, Dust, Voice

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Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.

William James

Swings, Law, Mind

William James (2016). “William James: Essays and Lectures”, p.237, Routledge

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A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.

William James

Horse, Cat, Science

William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.51, 谷月社

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

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