Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
William James
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Life
Mass
Toward
Irresistibly
Intellectual
Habits
Habit
Practicals
Emotional
Practical
Military
Bear
Small
Bears
Spiritual
Destiny
More quotes by William James
Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
William James
The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.
William James
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
To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.
William James
I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
William James
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
William James
Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
William James
It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.
William James
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
William James
The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.
William James
An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations and, second, on their number.
William James
Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James
Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
William James
The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
William James
The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of training that take place there and the first-rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence.
William James
Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
William James
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James
The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time
William James
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
William James
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William James
