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
If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.
Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
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.
A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.