American psychology owes a lot to this man - William James, Father of American Psychology. William James was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. Trained as an American philosopher, psychologist and physician, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century, which made him the most influential philosopher of United States. He was one of the major figures associated with the philosophical school of pragmatism, and was also one of the founders of functional psychology. James was responsible for the development of the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. His work influenced a lot of intellectuals including prominent statesmen, leaders, writers and even President Jimmy Carter. A prolific writer, James in his lifetime penned variedly on a wide range of topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. His most famous work, ‘The Principles of Psychology’ is counted amongst his most influential books. It contains ground-breaking work from him in the field of psychology, radical empiricism, philosophy and religion. A leader of the philosophical movement of Pragmatism and of the psychological movement of functionalism, James work constitutes of several quotes that reflect his ideology and give a new outlook to situations and life. Browse through this section and find out some famous quotes by William James.
To change one’s life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.
William James
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
William James
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
William James
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
William James
To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds,
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
William James
Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James
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.
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.
If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
William James
Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
William James
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.
William James
Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.
...do every day or two something for no other reason that 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.
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
William James
It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the scenery was there from that of his own.
William James
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.
William James
The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
William James
Damn the Absolute!
William James
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
William James
Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.
William James
Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner.
William James
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
William James
I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man.
(from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
William James
None of us are ever who we were yesterday.
William James
Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
William James
All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry "Help!
William James
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
The attempt at introspective analysis... is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see the darkness.
Whatever is beyond this narrow rational consciousness we mistake for our only consciousness.
William James
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure
My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.
William James
We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.
William James
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.
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.
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till we found something less excentric.
A stream of ideal tendency embedded in the external structure of the world.
William James
We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.
William James
As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
 always comes out of our own mind. )
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