Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Ever
Vices
Stroke
Little
Scientific
Undone
Nothing
Leaves
Spinning
Every
Fate
Strokes
Good
Virtue
Scar
Never
Evil
Strict
Character
Smallest
Fates
Littles
Vice
Wiped

More quotes by William James

Image
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
William James
Image
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
Image
So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
William James
Image
A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
William James
Image
If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
William James
Image
So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
William James
Image
With no attempt there can be no failure with no failure no humiliation.
William James
Image
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
William James
Image
All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.
William James
Image
Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
William James
Image
Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James
Image
Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
William James
Image
We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct.
William James
Image
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
William James
Image
Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
William James
Image
Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
William James
Image
We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
Image
The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out.
William James
Image
Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection.
William James
Image
As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
William James