Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.
William James
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Attention
Faculty
Character
Bringing
Back
Wander
Would
Improve
Excellence
Roots
Voluntarily
Judgment
Wandering
Education
Root
More quotes by William James
The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
William James
The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
William James
The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
William James
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
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
William James
Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
William James
No decision is, in itself, a decision.
William James
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
William James
The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
William James
It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
William James
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
William James
The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.
William James
True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.
William James
You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.
William James
One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.
William James
The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
William James
[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted.
William James
I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
William James
Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life
William James
