William James
William James
William Jameswas an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth11 January 1842
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them.
The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.
Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
Truth happens to an idea
Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.