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
A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.
Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon - deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.
We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
In business for yourself, not by yourself.
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.