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 good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
Impulse without reason is not enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.
But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
The faith circle is so congruous with human nature that the only explanation of the veto that intellectualists pass upon it must be sought in the offensive character to them of the faiths of certain concrete persons.
The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.
Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is ''All striving is vain,'' will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him.
To make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy . . . we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.
The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.
A cowboy is a man with guts and a horse.
Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions.