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Quote by William James

“Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.”

Quote by William James

Book:The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding

Work

The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding

This book delves into the philosophical and psychological aspects of truth, examining how individuals perceive and interpret reality. It explores the complexities of human cognition and the various factors that influence our understanding of truth. more

Author

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

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“The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.”

Men Feels Mind Lasts Views Concern Absolutes Philosophical Superiors Shallow Philosophic Overlapping

Book:William James: Essays and Lectures

Source: William James: Essays and Lectures

“Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.”

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Book:Pragmatism and the Conception of Thruth

Source: Pragmatism and the Conception of Thruth

“If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.”

Ifs Thinking Should Long Facts Space Numbers Originals Filled Ill Dues Enormous Occasions Remembered Recalls Forgetfulness Get Ahead Omission

Author:William James

“That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.”

Source: The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding

“Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.”

Giving Ideas Matter Whole Reality Surface Psychological Discussion Flats Realism Realist Cognitive Pragmatism

Book:The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding

Source: The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding

“Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.”

May Real Hard Names Freedom Highest Understood Harsh Old Fashioned Bondage Shrinks Identical Determinism True Freedom Fatality Harsh Words

Book:The Heart of William James

Source: The Heart of William James

“I've talked to a number of actors who have gained weight for roles, and just the sheer physical toll it puts on one's knees and shoulders - no one wants to do it again. I'm 57 and I don't think I'm going to take on any job or go on vacation again and see to it that I can gain 30 pounds.”

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Author:Tom Hanks

“On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.”

Ifs God Principles Hypothesis Theism

Book:Pragmatism

Source: Pragmatism

“In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those in a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to a contentless unit, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”

Source: The Principles of Psychology

“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.”

Thinking Men Humans May Ideas Character Might Cases Objects Abstract Association Concrete Humankind Uncertain Brutes Similarity Habitual Successors Crete

Author:William James