Quote

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

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
Men
Aim
Philosophical
College
Education
Teach
Good

More quotes by William James

Image
Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
William James
Image
Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
William James
Image
An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.
William James
Image
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
William James
Image
The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.
William James
Image
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
William James
Image
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
William James
Image
Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do
William James
Image
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot
William James
Image
Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
William James
Image
The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
Image
Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
William James
Image
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
William James
Image
The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out.
William James
Image
That which is most personal, is most interesting.
William James
Image
Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James
Image
From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
William James
Image
Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
William James
Image
The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
William James
Image
The strenuous life tastes better
William James