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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
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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
Becomes
True
Cannot
Denied
Truth
Anyway
Important
Finally
Thing
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People
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More quotes by William James
Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
William James
If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
William James
Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
William James
Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
William James
When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
William James
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
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
Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.
William James
All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.
William James
The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.
William James
It is your friends who make your world.
William James
The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
William James
Effort is a measure of a Man.
William James
Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.
William James
'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
William James
Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
William James
The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
William James
In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
William James