Quote

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

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
Men
Originally
Life
Wholly
Consists
Intellectual
Almost
Comes
Perceptual
Experience
Substitution
Order
Conceptual

More quotes by William James

Image
The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James
Image
Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
William James
Image
You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
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
Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
William James
Image
If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.
William James
Image
The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James
Image
If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
William James
Image
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.
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
I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
William James
Image
We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
William James
Image
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
William James
Image
The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
William James
Image
Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
Image
If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.
William James
Image
Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
William James
Image
Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
William James
Image
The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
William James
Image
The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
William James