William James Quotes

Memory and creativity are essential to education, but if you teach memory incorrectly, it is a total waste of time, and it will inhibit learning.

No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory

Let the main object... to seek and to find a method of instruction, by which teachers may teach less, but learners learn more.

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.

In the traditionally taught view of perception, data from the sensorium pours into the brain, works its way up the sensory hierarchy, and makes itself seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt - "perceived." But a closer examination of the data suggests this is incorrect. The brain is properly thought of as a mostly closed system that runs on its own internally generated activity.

The percept takes priority of the concept.

Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

While just looking, we are always hunting among objects, looking for what we desire or fear, endeavoring to recognize some pattern; on the other hand, objects themselves always "stare back," vie for our attention, throw at us their lures and endeavor to entrap us.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.

All of that is constantly operating when you not only learn, but when you recall. But as you recall in a different light, the weights with which something is more probably going to be or not recalled on the next instance, are going to be changed. So you're constantly changing the way, for instance, synapses are going to fire very easily or not so easily.

Learn it all, then forget it all.

Learning, like money, may be of so base a coin as to be utterly void of use; or, if sterling, may require good management to make it serve the purposes of sense or happiness.

Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.

Be selective about your external influences. Your multi-dimensional brain is influenced by everything you see, hear, read, smell, touch, feel or say.

I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.

Sight is a promiscuous sense. The avid gaze always wants more.

It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results.

Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.

I think if I were walking someplace and I saw a corpse my brain would tell me it was a million things before I believed it was a corpse.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

Love and delight are better teachers than compulsion.

Just the attempt to learn a [new] language is like running different software through the brain.