William James Quotes

“We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition”

“It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.”

“A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.”

“Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.”

“There is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me!"”

“So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.”

“Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.”

“To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides”

“It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

“The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.”

“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.”

“There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing”

“Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.”

“What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand."”

“The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.”

“It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.”

“We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.”

“Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”

“Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”

“Man lives for science as well as bread.”

“To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.”

“Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.”

“The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.”

“What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.”

“[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted.”