Quote

So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

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
Like
Habit
Unnecessary
Chaff
Stand
Denial
Softer
Attention
Habits
Volition
Around
Mortals
Concentrated
Everything
Fellow
Tower
Self
Fellows
Energetic
Things
Daily
Blast
Men
Rocks
Towers
Inured

More quotes by William James

Image
Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
William James
Image
The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
William James
Image
To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
William James
Image
In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.
William James
Image
In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common
William James
Image
But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
William James
Image
I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
William James
Image
Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
William James
Image
To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides
William James
Image
Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
William James
Image
The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
William James
Image
Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
William James
Image
Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
Image
We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
William James
Image
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
William James
Image
Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
William James
Image
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
William James
Image
Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
William James
Image
The education of attention would be an education par excellence
William James
Image
...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
William James