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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
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
Mean
Agreement
Property
Means
Tell
Reality
Truth
Falsity
Certain
Disagreement
Ideas
Dictionary
More quotes by William James
History is a bath of blood.
William James
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
William James
Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
William James
Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
William James
Individuality is founded in feeling
William James
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
William James
Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
William James
Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
William James
Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
William James
I will act as if I do make a difference.
William James
The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
William James
In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.
William James
When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.
William James
Time itself comes in drops.
William James
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
William James
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James
Choose a self and stand by it.
William James
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
The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
William James