Quote

What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.

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
Land
Suspect
Quality
Suspects
Race
Magnificent
Living
Britain
Better
Eventually
Everything
Destiny
Thing
Bigger
Believe
Succeed
Corresponding

More quotes by William James

Image
Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
Image
An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.
William James
Image
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
William James
Image
But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
William James
Image
Every claim creates an obligation.
William James
Image
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
William James
Image
Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.
William James
Image
How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.
William James
Image
Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.
William James
Image
Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.
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
The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
Image
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
William James
Image
First... a new theory is attacked as absurd then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
William James
Image
Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
William James
Image
Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
William James
Image
We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
William James
Image
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
Image
...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
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