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Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.
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
Past
Certain
Ascribed
May
Dreamed
Matter
Imagined
Done
Matters
People
Probably
Doubt
Seen
More quotes by William James
The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
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
In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common
William James
There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
William James
True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
William James
Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
William James
All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
William James
Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
William James
General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
William James
Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
William James
The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
William James
The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, words, words, words, must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.
William James
... 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
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
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
William James
Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation.
William James
I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
William James
The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
William James
