William James
William James
William Jameswas an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth11 January 1842
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
William James quotes about
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
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.
The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.
A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them.