Quote

Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences

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
Certain
Must
Mediate
Previous
Truths
Experiences
Theory
Truth

More quotes by William James

Image
Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
William James
Image
Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
Image
The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
William James
Image
Every claim creates an obligation.
William James
Image
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
William James
Image
There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
William James
Image
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
William James
Image
To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
William James
Image
In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.
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
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
Image
It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
William James
Image
We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
William James
Image
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
William James
Image
The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
William James
Image
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William James
Image
[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.
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
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
A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
William James