"As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
William James quotes (page 23 of 36)
716 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Our beliefs are really rules for action."
Read quote
3 likes
"There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it."
Read quote
3 likes
"All religions begin with the cry Help."
Read quote
3 likes
"An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number."
Read quote
3 likes
"We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves."
Read quote
3 likes
"Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. which give happiness. Thomas Jefferson We never enjoy perfect happiness; our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness; some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction."
Read quote
3 likes
"We are mere bundles of habits."
Read quote
3 likes
"We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness."
Read quote
3 likes
"It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it."
Read quote
3 likes
"The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party."
Read quote
3 likes
"I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly."
Read quote
3 likes
"We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out."
Read quote
3 likes
"Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating."
Read quote
3 likes
"The art of remembering is the art of thinking. When we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall."
Read quote
3 likes
"If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole."
Read quote
3 likes
"In teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are."
Read quote
3 likes
"Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were, together; the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing."
Read quote
3 likes
"Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease."
Read quote
3 likes
"Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?"
Read quote
3 likes