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
Cannot
Thinking
Exclude
Participating
Functions
Intellect
Function
Beings

More quotes by William James

Image
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
William James
Image
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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
Our minds thus grow in spots and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in it stains the ancient mass but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.
William James
Image
We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.
William James
Image
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
William James
Image
Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
William James
Image
... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.
William James
Image
We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct.
William James
Image
When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
William James
Image
In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
William James
Image
The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
William James
Image
I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.
William James
Image
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
William James
Image
Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
William James
Image
An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations and, second, on their number.
William James
Image
Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
Image
In business for yourself, not by yourself.
William James
Image
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
William James
Image
The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.
William James