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
Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.
If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.
We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities; it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.
For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
Habit is second nature, or rather . . . ten times nature.
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
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.
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
Time itself comes in drops.
There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.