William James - The Principles of Psychology (1890)

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If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.

William James
A thing is important if anyone think it important.

William James
In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.

William James
My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.

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

William James
The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.

William James
When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and replies.... His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmosphere more broad and vast...

William James
The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

William James
Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

William James
We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.

William James
Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.

William James
As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.

William James
How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.

William James
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

William James
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.... Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

William James
Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

William James
I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.

William James
The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.

William James
The aim of "science" is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them.

William James
The "marvels" of Science, about which so much edifying popular literature is written, are apt to be " caviare " to the men in the laboratories.

William James
Not one man in a billion, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good and makes him want more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher he will probably laugh at you for a fool.

William James
As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure.

William James
But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.

William James
Science... must be constantly reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claims at all.

William James
We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.

William James
If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important.... It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.

William James
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

William James
As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.

William James
Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.

William James
It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

William James