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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
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
William James
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
Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
William James
An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
William James
In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
William James
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
William James
No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
William James
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.
William James
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
William James
To spend life for something which outlasts it.
William James
I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives
William James
The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
William James
When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.
William James
Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
William James
With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
William James
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.
William James
Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa!
William James
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
William James
It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
William James
