"We know the meaning so long as no one asks us to define it.
Psychology is the science of mental life
More William James quotes
"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 ...
"The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.
"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 shoul...
"We must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights of char...
"An outree explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty. We should scratch round industriously till ...
"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 confuse...
"I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well-traine...
"The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection o...
"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 geomete...
"Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to ...
"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.
"There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.
"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 l...
"It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something the...