Quotes by William James

“The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the ...”

“It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himsel...”

“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we reme...”

“But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the di...”

“Psychology is the science of mental life”

“In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the ...”

“No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a li...”

“Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the...”

“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.”

“We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.”

“Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push th...”

“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 so...”

“A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.”

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”

“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

“To change ones life: 1. Start immediately. 2. Do it flamboyantly. 3. No exceptions.”

“Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome ...and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philan...”

“Resign your destiny to higher powers.”

“In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.”

“Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.”