William James Quotes

The dog, on the other hand, has few or no ideas because his brain acts in coarse fashion and because there are few connections with each single process.

Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.

Brutes abstract not. -- If it may be doubted, whether beasts compound and enlarge their ideas, that way, to any degree; this, I think, I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at all in them; and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to.

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

Remembering is a great invention of the mind.

The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

What is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere?

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.

To a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would appear trivial, as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal.

Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.

My feeling of the whole genre, of the terror tale, is this: The best thing that you can do for the readers in this field is to terrify them. It is something that is intellectual, it happens in your mind.

Wit is the lightning of the mind, reason the sunshine, and reflection the moonlight.

Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered; and the diffusion of knowledge, so astonishing in the last half-century, has rendered innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation.

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

A man without words is a man without thought.

The human mind is an organ for the discovery of truths rather than of falsehoods.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Memory is the primary and fundamental power, without which there could be no other intellectual operation.

The child has a mind able to absorb knowledge. He has the power to teach himself.

What's the point in having a mind if you don't use it to make judgements?

Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.

The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from one to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process.