Quote

We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.

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
Thinking
Exclude
Participating
Functions
Intellect
Function
Beings
Cannot

More quotes by William James

Image
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot
William James
Image
It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
William James
Image
One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.
William James
Image
A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
William James
Image
Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.
William James
Image
For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
William James
Image
To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
William James
Image
There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
William James
Image
Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to keep by force of mere inertia.
William James
Image
We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.
William James
Image
It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
William James
Image
You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.
William James
Image
...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
William James
Image
Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
William James
Image
If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
William James
Image
Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
William James
Image
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
William James
Image
All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
William James
Image
The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
William James
Image
Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
William James