William James Quotes

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

Every Man being conscious to himself, That he thinks, and that which his Mind is employ'd about whilst thinking, being the Ideas, that are there, 'tis past doubt, that Men have in their Minds several Ideas, such as are those expressed by the words, Whiteness, Hardness, Sweetness, Thinking, Motion, Man, Elephant, Army, Drunkenness, and others: It is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received Doctrine, That Men have native Ideas, and original Characters stamped upon their Minds, in their very first Being.

Hamlet 's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.

An idea is a feat of association.

Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.

I've reached the moment where the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.

The human mind may perceive truth only through thinking, as is clear from Augustine.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

One does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.

It turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems.

So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.

To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.

Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not "a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

Thus ordered thinking arises out of the ordered course of nature in which man finds himself, and this thinking is from the beginning nothing more than the subjective reproduction of the regularity according to the law of natural phenomena. On the other hand, this reproduction is only possible by means of the will that controls the concatenation of ideas.

What is essential in the life of a man of my kind is what he thinks and how he thinks, and not what he does or suffers.

The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.