Quote

The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.

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
Fatalism
Vagueness
Indestructible
Impulse
Race
Take
Life

More quotes by William James

Image
From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
William James
Image
The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.
William James
Image
Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
William James
Image
How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.
William James
Image
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
William James
Image
You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
William James
Image
A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
William James
Image
Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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
The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.
William James
Image
Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.
William James
Image
Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
William James
Image
The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
William James
Image
It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
William James
Image
I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
William James
Image
The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
William James
Image
Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
William James
Image
Choose a self and stand by it.
William James
Image
Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
William James
Image
Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James