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William James Quotes about Character

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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.

Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.

William James
Character, Doe, Circumstances

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

William James
Character, Roots, Excellence
William James (1961). “Psychology: The Briefer Course”, p.95, Courier Corporation

Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.

William James
Character, Sea, Feelings
William James (1950). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.125, Courier Corporation

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 fashioned our characters in the wrong way.

William James
Life, Success, Character
William James (1961). “Psychology: The Briefer Course”, p.16, Courier Corporation

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
Character, Fate, Evil
"The Principles of Psychology". Book by William James, 1890.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

William James
Birthday, Character, Age
William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.121, Courier Corporation

We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.

William James
Character, Mean, Successful
William James (1918). “The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2”, p.410, Courier Corporation

Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.

William James
Philosophy, Character, People
William James (2013). “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New Thought Edition - Secret Library)”, p.24, Lulu Press, Inc

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.

William James
Lying, Character, Men
William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.83, 谷月社

Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.

William James
Character, Mean, Organization
William James (1987). “Essays, Comments, and Reviews”, p.90, Harvard University Press

Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

William James
Character, Mind, World
William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1979). “Some Problems of Philosophy”, p.111, Harvard University Press

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

William James
Real, Character, Feelings
William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.124, University of Illinois Press

Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.

William James
Character, Men, Thinking

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