Quote

Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.

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
Brief
Nevertheless
Lower
Fitful
Acts
Momentous
Critical
Destinies
Destiny
Determining
Higher
Voluntary
Attending

More quotes by William James

Image
From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.
William James
Image
As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
William James
Image
If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
William James
Image
There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
William James
Image
You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.
William James
Image
An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
William James
Image
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
William James
Image
Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
William James
Image
Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
William James
Image
Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
William James
Image
If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
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
We are mere bundles of habits.
William James
Image
In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
William James
Image
The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
William James
Image
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
William James
Image
If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
William James
Image
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
William James
Image
To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
William James
Image
The stream of thought flows on but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
William James