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William James Quotes about Science

All William James Quotes Acceptance Achievement Adversity Affection Age Alcohol Anxiety Apology Appreciation Art Attitude Authority Belief Business Challenges Change Character Children Choices College Common Sense Community Consciousness Courage Creativity Criticism Design Desire Destiny Doubt Earth Education Effort Encouragement Energy Ethics Evil Excellence Exercise Experience Failing Failure Faith Fate Fear Feelings Fighting Free Will Freedom Friendship Genius Giving Giving Up Glory God Happiness Hate Heart Heroism History Holiday Honesty Human Nature Imagination Impulse Individuality Inspiration Inspirational Knowledge Laughter Leadership Learning Letting Go Life Literature Logic Loss Love Lying Making A Difference Memories Military Motivation Motivational Opportunity Optimism Pain Passion Past Perception Perseverance Personality Perspective Philosophy Pleasure Politics Positive Positive Thinking Prayer Procrastination Psychology Purpose Quality Reading Reality Reflection Religion Responsibility Risk Running Science quotes Self Esteem Self Love Society Soul Stress Struggle Study Success Suffering Teaching Today Truth Virtue Vision Wall War Weakness Wealth Wisdom Worry

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

Science, Belief, Enough

The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

Science, Mind, Progress

William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.298, Courier Corporation

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

Creativity, Mean, Science

William James (2012). “Psychology: The Briefer Course”, p.195, Courier Corporation

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

Science, Authority, Accounts

William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.39, 谷月社

First... a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

Science, Discovery, Important

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking Lecture 6 (1907)

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.

Educational, Philosophy, Science

William James (2008). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.57, Nuvision Pubns

We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.

Powerful, Science, Data

'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

Knowledge, Science, Facts

William James (2012). “The Will to Believe and Human Immortality”, p.271, Courier Corporation

We [may] answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"-in other words, instead of giving the reason for a fact, we give another example of the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason, has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.

Science, Men, Offering

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

Science, Past, Taught Us

William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.119, 谷月社

I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.

Believe, Science, Deception

William James (1986). “Essays in Psychical Research”, p.22, Harvard University Press

...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.

Science, Abuse, Usual

William James (2015). “Pragmatism: Human Understanding”, p.22, 谷月社

We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are given why we should not pray. Others give reasons why we should pray. Very little is said of the reason we do pray. The reason is simple: We pray because we cannot help praying.

Prayer, Science, Simple

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.

Science, Apology, Unique

William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.9, Courier Corporation

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.

Children, Science, Uprising

The Principles of Psychology vol. 1, ch. 4 (1890)

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

Lonely, Independent, Science

William James (2012). “The Will to Believe and Human Immortality”, p.133, Courier Corporation

Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'.

Science, Expression, Talking

The Principles of Psychology vol. 1, ch. 9 (1890).

Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.

Nature, Science, Flames

William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.182, Courier Corporation

When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and replies. ... His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmosphere more broad and vast.

Science, Order, Two

Man lives for science as well as bread.

Science, Men, Bread

William James (1987). “Essays, Comments, and Reviews”, p.11, Harvard University Press

The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.

Science, Self, Brain

William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.146, Courier Corporation

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.

Science, Law, Together

William James (1986). “Essays in Psychical Research”, p.101, Harvard University Press

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.

Horse, Cat, Science

William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.51, 谷月社

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

Science, Dust, Voice

The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.

God, Science, Law

The Varieties of Religious Experience Lecture 20 (1902)

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