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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

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
Results
Processes
Forsooth
Process
Circle
Diameter
Two
Similar
Terminate
Points
Circumference
Reason
Latter
Psychologists
Must
Circles
Bane
Thing
Psychology
Semi
Would
Suppose
Psychologist

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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
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So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.
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Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
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Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.
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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
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Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
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Man lives for science as well as bread.
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The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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We can act as if there were a God feel as if we were free consider Nature as if she were full of special designs lay plans as if we were to be immortal and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
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We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are given why we should not pray. Others give reasons why we should pray. Very little is said of the reason we do pray. The reason is simple: We pray because we cannot help praying.
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Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
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The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.
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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
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