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Quotes from The Principles of Psychology — William James

1842–1910 United States

← All quotes by William James

30 quotes

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

A thing is important if anyone think it important.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

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.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

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.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

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.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

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.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

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.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

[M]ost of what happens actually is forgotten.

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: William James (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.