William James Quotes

“Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task”

“We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.”

“But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.”

“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.”

“A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.”

“Choose a self and stand by it.”

“The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.”

“Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one”

“Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.”

“Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.”

“Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.”

“Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.”

“Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.”

“... the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.”

“Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”

“Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.”

“The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.”

“There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.”

“The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.”

“Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences”

“In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.”

“As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them.”

“Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.”

“Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.”

“When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.”