Quote

It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.

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
Cultivate
Silence
Word
Power
Important

More quotes by William James

Image
There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
William James
Image
A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
William James
Image
I don't sing because I'm happy I'm happy because I sing.
William James
Image
Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
William James
Image
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
Image
Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James
Image
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
William James
Image
Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
William James
Image
We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.
William James
Image
True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
William James
Image
Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
William James
Image
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
William James
Image
Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.
William James
Image
The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
William James
Image
My experience is what I agree to attend to.
William James
Image
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
William James
Image
No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.
William James
Image
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
Image
To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
William James
Image
There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
William James