William James
Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.Collection: Teacher
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.Collection: Science
The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.Collection: Teacher
... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.Collection: Religious
In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.Collection: Philosophy
Be patient and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important.Collection: Philosophy
If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this.Collection: Irrelevance
Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.Collection: Facts
(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some 5 or 6 score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale.Collection: Hands
Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.Collection: Jealousy
Truth is something that happens to an idea.Collection: Ideas
So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.Collection: Taken
Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.Collection: Men
Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.Collection: Lazy
Instinct leads, logic does but follow.Collection: Intuition
Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.Collection: Creating
There are 3 rules to follow if you want to change; (1) Start immediately, (2) Do it flamboyantly, (3) No exceptions.Collection: Want
You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.Collection: Experience
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.Collection: Lying
The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.Collection: Attitude
Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.Collection: Men
Our beliefs are really rules for action.Collection: Belief
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.Collection: Responsibility
I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.Collection: Lying
We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.Collection: Unique
There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.Collection: Spiritual
Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.Collection: Evil
Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. which give happiness. Thomas Jefferson We never enjoy perfect happiness; our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness; some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.Collection: Happiness
The education of attention would be an education par excellenceCollection: Excellence
There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.Collection: Differences
To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.Collection: Philosophy
Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.Collection: Trying
The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.Collection: Needs
There is a voice inside which speaks and says, "This is the real me!"Collection: Real
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.Collection: Inspirational
We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.Collection: Life
We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.Collection: Love
I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.Collection: Suicide
Effort is a measure of a Man.Collection: Sports
The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.Collection: Happiness
Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Character
As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.Collection: Wise
The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.Collection: Block
In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.Collection: Inspirational
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.Collection: Life And Love
Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon - deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.Collection: Life
With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation.Collection: Humiliation
The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our timeCollection: Positive