Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by William James

Quote by William James

“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.”

Quote by William James

Create image

Author

William James
William James

William James, born on January 11, 1842, and died on August 26, 1910, was an influential American philosopher, psychologist, and writer. He is considered one of the founders of functionalism in psychology and has had a profound impact on the fields of psychology, philosophy, and religion. more

You May Also Like

“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.”

MenWantDoneWholeCharacterLyingDifferencesNumbersMoralIntellectualWhole LifeChiefsFantasticExcessAestheticQuestsUnnecessarySubjectiveBrutesSuperfluousPropensity
Book:Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays
Create image

“Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.”

MenMayMeanPhilosophyFeelingsAsksIndividualGrowsMoralDivineSolitudeOrganizationRelationTheologyRitualEvident
Book:James and Dewey on Belief and Experience
Create image

“What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.”

MenNeedsShouldKindHelpingNationsCommonAlivePoetLonelyFortuneWarmGloriousFiftyFourthMonumentCivicsValorDubiousOratorsGregarious
Book:Essays in Religion and Morality
Create image