Quote

[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.

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
Persons
Person
Ther
Little
Personality
Important
Difference
Differences
Path
Another
Littles

More quotes by William James

Image
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
William James
Image
There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
William James
Image
The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
William James
Image
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
William James
Image
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
William James
Image
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
William James
Image
... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.
William James
Image
The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
William James
Image
We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
William James
Image
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
Image
The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
William James
Image
I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
William James
Image
I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
William James
Image
The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.
William James
Image
Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
William James
Image
When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
William James
Image
The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
William James
Image
Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
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
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
William James