Quote

Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.

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
Mankind
Common
Reality
Always
Heroism
World
Essentially
Held
Theatre
Instinct

More quotes by William James

Image
You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.
William James
Image
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
William James
Image
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
William James
Image
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Image
Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
William James
Image
There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
William James
Image
I don't sing because I'm happy I'm happy because I sing.
William James
Image
All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.
William James
Image
The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
William James
Image
Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
William James
Image
We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
William James
Image
We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
Image
You can't out-perform your self-image.
William James
Image
The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.
William James
Image
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
Image
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
William James
Image
No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
William James
Image
Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
William James
Image
Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
William James
Image
The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
William James