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Truth in our ideas means their power to work.

William James

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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Power
Ideas
Mean
Work
Means
Truth

More quotes by William James

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We are mere bundles of habits.
William James
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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
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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James
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No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
William James
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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
William James
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Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
William James
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
William James
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
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Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
William James
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
William James
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
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I don't sing because I'm happy I'm happy because I sing.
William James
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You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
William James
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Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
William James
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The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
William James
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Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
William James
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To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides
William James
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Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
William James
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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
William James
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There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James