Quote

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

William James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Way
Psychiatry
Abnormal
Philosophical
Normal
Study
Understanding
Best

More quotes by William James

Image
The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
William James
Image
The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.
William James
Image
We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
William James
Image
My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
William James
Image
It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
William James
Image
No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.
William James
Image
The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
William James
Image
The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.
William James
Image
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
William James
Image
The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
William James
Image
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
Image
Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
William James
Image
The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
William James
Image
Events are influenced by our very great desires.
William James
Image
It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
William James
Image
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
William James
Image
As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
Image
The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
William James
Image
Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.
William James
Image
To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
William James