William James Quotes

511 quotes in 4990 categories

• I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
• Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
• To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
• There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire,…
• Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life
• No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
• Habit is second nature, or rather . . . ten times nature.
• We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into…
• It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
• The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of…
• Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects…
• An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
• The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes…
• From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with…
• The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these…
• If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain…
• All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less…
• But when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, whilst…
• If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples; if it be unfamiliar, make it figure as part of a story; if…
• An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the…

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