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William James
177 quotes
“I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1870 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diary entry (April 30, 1870) as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, p. 323; Letters of William James, vol. I, p. 147.
“All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lecture at the Harvard Divinity School (13 March 1884); published in the The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine as The Dilemma of Determinism (September 1884)
“Freedom is only necessity understood.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)
“What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, — nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)
“The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)
“Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) republished in The Will to Believe, Dover, 1956, p. 149
“The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) p.153
“What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?...It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dilemma of Determinism (1884) p.155
“We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1895 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) edited by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 225
“Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The necessity of faith as an ingredient in our mental attitude is strongly insisted on by the scientific philosophers of the present day; but by a singularly arbitrary caprice they say that it is only legitimate when used in the interests of one particular proposition, — the proposition, namely, that the course of nature is uniform. That nature will follow to-morrow the same laws that she follows to-day is, they all admit, a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The concrete man has but one interest — to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How you produce volume after volume the way you do is more than I can conceive. ...But you haven't to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts as I do. It is like walking through the densest brush wood.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1890 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Henry James (ca. 1890) as quoted by Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007) p. 297. Also as quoted partially by Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (…
“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.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1895 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to E.L. Godkin (24 December 1895)
“There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Will to Believe (1897)
“In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.”
William James (1842–1910) first seen 1897 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to John Jay Chapman (5 April 1897)
“Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
“Tell him to live by yes and no — yes to everything good, no to everything bad.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) by Ralph Barton Perry, Vol. II, ch. 91
“Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 1 : The Scope of Psychology (1918 edition)
“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, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 fashioning our characters in the wrong way.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits ... A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts which filled them.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A thing forgotten on one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after... saunter into the mind... [T]he sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think, and... apparent oblivion is no proof against possible recall under other conditions.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[M]ost of what happens actually is forgotten.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When memory begins to decay, proper names are what go first ...[[wikt:common#Adjective|[C]ommon]] qualities and names have contracted an infinitely greater number of associations ...than the names of most of the persons ...Their memory is better organized. ...'Organization' means numerous associations; and the more numerous the associations, the greater the number of paths of recall. For the same reason... words... which form the grammatical framework of all our speech, are the very last to decay.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have ...as M. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories. The visual... tactile... muscular... auditory memory may all vary independently... and different individuals may have them developed in different degrees. As a rule, a man’s memory is good in the departments in which his interest is strong; but those departments are apt to be those in which his discriminative sensibility is high. ...[D]ifferences in men’s imagining power... the machinery of memory must be largely determined thereby.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mr. Galton ...in his English Men of Science, has given ...cases showing individual variations in the type of memory... Some have it verbal. Others... for facts and figures, others for form. Most say... [it] must first be rationally conceived and assimilated.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Setting the mind to remember... involves a continual minimal irradiation of excitement into paths which lead thereto... the continued presence of the thing in the 'fringe' of our consciousness. Letting the thing go involves withdrawal of the irradiation, unconsciousness of the thing, and... obliteration of the paths.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]hings are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. ...[I]t pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions.... But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.”
William James (1842–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source