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Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
William James
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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Attention
Making
Attentive
Power
Excel
Men
Geniuses
Sustained
Commonly
Believed
Genius
More quotes by William James
Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
William James
Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.
William James
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
William James
Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
William James
The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
William James
[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
William James
Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
William James
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
Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
William James
I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
William James
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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
Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
William James
Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
William James
In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.
William James
We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
William James
Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
William James
Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
William James
I don't sing because I'm happy I'm happy because I sing.
William James
Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
William James
