Quote

First... a new theory is attacked as absurd then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

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
Discovery
Attacked
Theory
Insignificant
Seen
Claim
Science
Absurd
True
Discovered
Firsts
Claims
First
Finally
Admitted
Important
Obvious
Adversaries

More quotes by William James

Image
Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
William James
Image
Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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
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
We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
William James
Image
It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
William James
Image
It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
William James
Image
If it works, it's true.
William James
Image
The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
William James
Image
There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
William James
Image
Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.
William James
Image
I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James
Image
Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
William James
Image
The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
William James
Image
Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
William James
Image
Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
William James
Image
Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
William James
Image
If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.
William James
Image
The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.
William James
Image
Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
William James