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
Instinct
Mankind
Common
Reality
Always
Heroism
World
Essentially
Held
Theatre

More quotes by William James

Image
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
William James
Image
The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
William James
Image
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
William James
Image
Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
William James
Image
Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.
William James
Image
For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
William James
Image
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
William James
Image
To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
William James
Image
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
William James
Image
Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
William James
Image
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
William James
Image
Act the part and you will become the part.
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
An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: There is very little difference between one man and another but what little there is, is very important. This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.
William James
Image
Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
William James
Image
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
William James
Image
All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
William James
Image
In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
William James
Image
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot
William James
Image
Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
William James