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Mind Quotes by William James

51 Mind quotes by William James

All Mind quotes William James’s page

A mind is made up by what it feeds upon, William James writes. He points out that changing one’s attitude can reshape the whole quality of life, and that perception blends what the senses bring with what the mind adds. In this view, the mind itself is a powerful lever for change.

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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

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You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.

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Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

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The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind

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“What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable.”

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The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.

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The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love…

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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.

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It would probably astound each of us beyond measure to be let into his neighbors mind and to find how different the…

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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.

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How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon,…

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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the…

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In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.

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Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to…

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Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience…

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The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal…

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In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the…

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The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of…

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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more…

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Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she…

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Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they…

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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In…

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The art of remembering is the art of thinking. When we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind…

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When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of…

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In teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him…

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To begin with, our knowledge grows in spots. The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge ever grows all over...…

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If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is…

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The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus…

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Be patient and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination…

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So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of…

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“Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the…

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To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.

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Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the…

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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.

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Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their…

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

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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.

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It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the…

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Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and…

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Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably…

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More by William James

Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we…

In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who…

“Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered…

Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.

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

Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience; they will lead him nowhere or…

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

It is your friends who make your world.

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them,…

“How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and…

There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes…