Quote

The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.

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
Must
Aspect
Prompts
Made
Subjects
Unchanging
Word
Prescriptions
Attention
Inevitably
Show
Aspects
Away
Wander
Wanders
Shows
Subject
Prompt
Change
Questions
Prescription

More quotes by William James

Image
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James
Image
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
William James
Image
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
William James
Image
All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
William James
Image
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
William James
Image
There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
William James
Image
The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
William James
Image
Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
William James
Image
The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
William James
Image
All religions begin with the cry Help.
William James
Image
The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
William James
Image
Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
William James
Image
The true'to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.
William James
Image
If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
William James
Image
But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
William James
Image
Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
William James
Image
Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
William James
Image
I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.
William James
Image
Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
William James
Image
Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
William James