Quote

The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.

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
Doe
Able
Must
Think
Kant
Thinking
Accompany
Breathe
Objects
Actually

More quotes by William James

Image
To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
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
... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.
William James
Image
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
Image
There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James
Image
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
William James
Image
Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
William James
Image
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
William James
Image
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
William James
Image
What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
William James
Image
The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
William James
Image
All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.
William James
Image
We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
William James
Image
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
William James
Image
Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
William James
Image
If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.
William James
Image
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
William James
Image
Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
William James
Image
The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James
Image
Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
William James