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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
William James
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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Education
Teach
Good
Men
Aim
Philosophical
College
More quotes by William James
The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
William James
I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James
Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
William James
[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
William James
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 in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
William James
Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
William James
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
William James
Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
William James
There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
William James
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?
William James
He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
William James
Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
William James
My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
William James
All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.
William James
The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.
William James
Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
William James
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
William James
Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
William James
If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
William James
