Quote

Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.

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
Facts
Beliefs
Belief
Attention
Fact

More quotes by William James

Image
Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
Image
The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
William James
Image
Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
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
It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
William James
Image
Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
William James
Image
What a teacher needs to know about psychology might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.
William James
Image
The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
William James
Image
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
William James
Image
You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
William James
Image
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
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
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
William James
Image
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
William James
Image
Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
Image
There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James
Image
[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted.
William James
Image
Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
William James
Image
Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
William James
Image
A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
William James