Quote

To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides

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
Object
Lead
Objects
Truth
World
Provides
Context

More quotes by William James

Image
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
William James
Image
Act the part and you will become the part.
William James
Image
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
William James
Image
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
William James
Image
Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.
William James
Image
[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
William James
Image
We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
William James
Image
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
William James
Image
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
William James
Image
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
William James
Image
The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.
William James
Image
Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
William James
Image
The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
William James
Image
To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction
William James
Image
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
Image
Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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
Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
William James
Image
The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
William James
Image
The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.
William James