William James Quotes

I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

A closed mind is a dying mind.

My body has certainly wandered a good deal, but I have an uneasy suspicion that my mind has not wandered enough.

Minds are like flowers. If you let it sit there without soaking anything up, it will dry up.

For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn't be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It's a surprise to me that this hasn't happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.

I think you never leave what you learn.

The mind reaches great heights only by spurts.

Our mind is the most valuable possession that we have. The quality of our lives is, and will be, a reflection of how well we develop, train, and utilize this precious gift.

Your mind grows through use.

Because you don't learn anything unless you can find the patience to read. TV takes that away from you. It robs you from your mind.

Untilled soil, however fertile it may be, will bear thistles and thorns; so it is with man's mind.

Unlike physical progress, which is subject to natural restrictions, the qualities of the mind can be developed limitlessly.

I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.

The mind is left bereft when it is nothing more than a tool of regurgitation.

Every person should make it his business to gather new ideas from sources other than the environment in which he daily lives and works. The mind becomes withered, stagnant, narrow and closed unless it searches for new ideas.

Intellectually, most people never wash. They never free their minds of the accumulated rubbish of centuries.

Learning is a kind of natural food for the mind.

The mind never need stop growing. Indeed, one of the few experiences which never pall is the experience of watching one's own mind and how it produces new interests, responds to new stimuli, and develops new thoughts, apparently without effort and almost independently of one's own conscious control.

[I]f a man bred to the seafaring life, and accustomed to think and talk only of matters relating to navigation, enters into discourse upon any other subject; it is well known, that the language and the notions proper to his own profession are infused into every subject, and all things are measured by the rules of navigation: and if he should take it into his head to philosophize concerning the faculties of the mind, it cannot be doubted, but he would draw his notions from the fabric of the ship, and would find in the mind, sails, masts, rudder, and compass.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

History is the record of human progress, a record of the struggle of the advancement of the human mind, of the human spirit, towards some known or unknown objective.

The mind does not easily unlearn what it has been long in learning.

The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.

NO error is infused into the young mind, to lie there dormant, or to be reproduced only when the subject of thought or action recurs to which the error belongs; but the error becomes a model or archetype, after whose likeness the active powers of the mind create a thousand other errors.

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.