William James Quotes

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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody.... And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.

William James
Geology, economics, mechanics are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.

William James
Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.

William James
The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.

William James
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.

William James
We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.

William James
Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.

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

William James
The true'to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.

William James
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
In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.

William James
The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.

William James
Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.

William James
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
The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.

William James
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
Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes

William James
So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.

William James
Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.

William James
On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.

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

William James
Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

William James
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
A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.

William James
Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.

William James
Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.

William James
All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

William James
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

William James
The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.

William James
A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock

William James