Quote

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses 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
Nothing
Challenges
Bank
Long
System
Beliefs
Belief
Notes
Fact
Refuse
Lives
Credit
Facts
Pass
Truth
Thoughts
Part
Nobody
Refuses

More quotes by William James

Image
Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
William James
Image
Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
William James
Image
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
William James
Image
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
Image
Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
William James
Image
Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
William James
Image
The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
William James
Image
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
Image
We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.
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
The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.
William James
Image
Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.
William James
Image
True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
William James
Image
To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James
Image
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
William James
Image
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
Image
Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
William James
Image
I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James
Image
The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
William James
Image
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
William James