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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
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
Idea
Dismissed
Inspirational
Trivial
Dream
Condemned
Change
Ridiculous
Ideas
Finally
Firsts
Becomes
First
Vision
Everybody
More quotes by William James
History is a bath of blood.
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
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Time itself comes in drops.
William James
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.
William James
The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
William James
Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
William James
Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
William James
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
William James
The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
William James
Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
William James
A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
William James
To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
William James
The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
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.
William James
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
William James
A thing is important if anyone think it important.
William James
There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing
William James
