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
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.
In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.
The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
Belief creates the actual fact.
Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.