Quote

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

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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
Good
Waiting
Operations
Abound
Think
Talk
Practical
Prompt
Thinking
Lying
Abstract
Prompts
Rather
Opportunities
Pupils
Opportunity
Thus
Seize
Feel
Pass
Preach
Feels
Wait
Operation
Much
Habit
Practicals

More quotes by William James

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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
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The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
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All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.
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The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.
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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
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
William James
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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
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Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
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Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
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The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
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How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?
William James
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This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.
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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
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
William James
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
William James
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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.
William James
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If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.
William James
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My experience is what I agree to attend to.
William James
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The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
William James