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Science Quotes by William James

38 Science quotes by William James

All Science quotes William James’s page

Facts are the bounds of knowledge that James says science cannot ignore. He argues that believing something is impossible blocks discovery, and that science should stay humble, listening to the heart while correcting false ideas. He also notes that science’s impersonal view may one day be seen as just a useful phase.

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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.

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Man lives for science as well as bread.

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“Psychology is the science of mental life”

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

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

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Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.

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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.

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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together…

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

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

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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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“In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.”

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...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions…

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The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the…

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The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail…

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We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are given…

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I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain…

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Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are…

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“the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitively triumphant…

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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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We [may] answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"-in…

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(Five) thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch…

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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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Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as…

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Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences…

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Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived…

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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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“Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us,…

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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against…

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All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than…

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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence,…

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Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we…

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A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it…

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Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she…

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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the…

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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…

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The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The…

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The greatest discovery of the 19th century was not in the realm of the physical sciences, but the power of the subconscious…

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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…