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The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
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
Thing
Politics
Intercourse
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Society
Interfere
Happiness
Provided
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Assume
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Others
Violence
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More quotes by William James
The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
William James
Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
William James
Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.
William James
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
William James
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
The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
William James
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
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
William James
What holds attention determines action.
William James
We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
William James
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
William James
When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
William James
I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.
William James
I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
William James
I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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
It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
William James
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
William James
The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James
Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
