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In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.
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
Start
Spoken
Getting
Reasoning
Next
Background
Cannot
Backgrounds
Person
Philosophical
Meanwhile
Trying
Somehow
Answering
Mind
Step
Dressing
Make
Ought
Surfing
More quotes by 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
Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess.
William James
'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
William James
Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
William James
Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
William James
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
William James
We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
William James
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
William James
It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
William James
The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.
William James
The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
William James
...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
William James
With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
William James
Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
William James
Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.
William James
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
William James
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
William James
We can act as if there were a God feel as if we were free consider Nature as if she were full of special designs lay plans as if we were to be immortal and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
William James
We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
William James
Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
William James