"In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common"
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
William James quotes (page 35 of 36)
716 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim."
Read quote
3 likes
"Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all."
Read quote
3 likes
"I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ."
Read quote
3 likes
"Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection."
Read quote
3 likes
"True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as."
Read quote
3 likes
"To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher."
Read quote
3 likes
"You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing."
Read quote
3 likes
"All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on."
Read quote
3 likes
"Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming."
Read quote
3 likes
"Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions."
Read quote
3 likes
"The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows."
Read quote
3 likes
"The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes."
Read quote
3 likes
"Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow."
Read quote
3 likes
"No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget."
Read quote
3 likes
"In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives."
Read quote
3 likes
"What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it."
Read quote
3 likes
"To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking."
Read quote
3 likes
"Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes