Quote

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

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
Ass
Qualities
Particular
Quality
Friends
Tell
Doe
Candor
Tolerate

More quotes by William James

Image
I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
William James
Image
Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
William James
Image
General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
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
The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
William James
Image
If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.
William James
Image
Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
William James
Image
In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
William James
Image
Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
William James
Image
To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
William James
Image
Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
William James
Image
It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
William James
Image
History is a bath of blood.
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 war-function has grasped us so far but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
William James
Image
When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
William James
Image
Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mentalfire.
William James
Image
If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
William James
Image
The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
William James
Image
A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
William James