Quote

When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.

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
Reconstruct
Wholeness
Concepts
Broken
Reality
Never

More quotes by William James

Image
We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.
William James
Image
Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
William James
Image
The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
William James
Image
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
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
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
William James
Image
The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
William James
Image
Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
William James
Image
There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
William James
Image
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
William James
Image
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
William James
Image
The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
William James
Image
When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
William James
Image
The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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
Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.
William James
Image
Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
Image
So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
William James
Image
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
William James
Image
On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
William James