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Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.

William James

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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Fixed
Intelligence
Achieve
Goal
Means
Mean
Variable
Variables
Achieving

More quotes by William James

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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
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
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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
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
William James
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
William James
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The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
William James
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
William James
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
William James
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
William James
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We can act as if there were a God feel as if we were free consider Nature as if she were full of special designs lay plans as if we were to be immortal and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
William James
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An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete... Its motor consequences are what clinch it.
William James
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The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.
William James
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... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
William James
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General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
William James
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
William James
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As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
William James
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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
William James
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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
William James