American Philosopher
110+ William James Quotes On Education, Attention And Pragmatism
Updated: by Quotlr.com Team
William James was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. He is considered to be one of the most influential thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is often referred to as the "Father of American Psychology." He is best known for his work on pragmatism and the philosophy of religion, as well as his writings on the philosophy of consciousness, free will, and the stream of thought. Following is our collection on famous quotes by William James on life, education, attention.
- Born
- January 11, 1842
- Died
- August 26, 1910
- Known as
- American Philosopher
Top 10 William James Quotes
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1.
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
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2.
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
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3.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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4.
The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.
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5.
When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that in itself is a choice.
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6.
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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7.
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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8.
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
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9.
If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
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10.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James Image Quotes
William James Short Quotes
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
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Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
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Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
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Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
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A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
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If you want a trait, act as if you already have the trait.
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Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
William James Quotes About Life
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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
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To change one's life: a. Start immediately b. B. Do it flamboyantly c. No exceptions Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted.
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The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
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The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." "This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it." "Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.
William James Quotes About Education
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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
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The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
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In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
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The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.
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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.
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Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
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As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James Quotes About Attention
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The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
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The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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What holds attention determines action.
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Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
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The education of attention would be an education par excellence
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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.
William James Quotes About Pragmatism
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[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted.
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If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
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From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
William James Quotes About Love
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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In contentment and joy are found the height and perfection of all love towards our neighbor.
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From faith, hope, and love, the virtues of religion referring to God, there arises a double act which bears on the spiritual communion exercised between God and us; the hearing of the word and prayer.
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There is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me!"
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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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Everyone who understands the nature of God rightly necessarily knows that God is to be believed and hoped in, that he is to be loved and called upon, and to be heard in all things.
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Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.
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The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.
William James Quotes About Religion
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.
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There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
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From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
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The first act of religion, therefore, concerns those things which are communicated to us from God. The other concerns those things which we yield to God.
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Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
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Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.
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In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
William James Quotes About Truth
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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
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As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
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We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
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Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
William James Quotes About Habit
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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.
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Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
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Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.
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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
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Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
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True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
William James Quotes About Self
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The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.
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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
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Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self..."
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Choose a self and stand by it.
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You can't out-perform your self-image.
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To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction
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One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
William James Quotes About World
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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.
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The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
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It is your friends who make your world.
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Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
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Hence the end of the world should be awaited with all longing by all believers.
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
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Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.
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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.
William James Quotes About Faith
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
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Faith is the virtue by which, clinging-to the faithfulness of God, we lean upon him, so that we may obtain what he gives to us.
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
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Participation in the blessings of the union with Christ comes when the faithful have all the things needed to live well and blessedly to God.
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Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
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Therefore, the church is not absolutely necessary as an object of faith, not even for us today, for then Abraham and the other prophets would not have given assent to those things which were revealed to them from God without any intervening help of the church.
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.
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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.
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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
William James Quotes About Nature
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
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In the exercise of God's efficiency, the decree of God comes first. This manner of working is the most perfect of all and notably agrees with the divine nature.
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The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
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The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.
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For this is our most perfect duty and yet least known to us by nature: Whatever we conceive or will should be joined with the good of our neighbor.
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The relative property of the Son is to be begotten, that is, so to proceed from the Father as to be a participant of the same essence and perfectly carry on the Father's nature.
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Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
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We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
William James Famous Quotes And Sayings
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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
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If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
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Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
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Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
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No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
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Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
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Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
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The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
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It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
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We don't laugh because we're happy -- we're happy because we laugh.
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Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
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Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
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Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.
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Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
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Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
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To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
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Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
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A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
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The attributes of God tell us what He is and who He is.
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
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If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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The path to cheerfulness is to sit cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the as if technique.
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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
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He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
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An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.
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This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
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We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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First... a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
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Sanctification is not to be understood here as a separation from ordinary use or consecration to some special use, although this meaning is often present in Scripture, sometimes referring to outward and sometimes to inward or effectual separation.
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If it works, it's true.
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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
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Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
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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.
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We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
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To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
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The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
Life Lessons by William James
- William James taught that we should live life with purpose and passion, and strive to make the most of our potential.
- He believed that our beliefs and attitudes shape our lives, and that we should strive to be open-minded and tolerant of different perspectives.
- He also argued that we should take responsibility for our own lives, and strive to make the most of our opportunities.
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