William James Quotes

Let's just say that I am aware my style has meaning for some people.

I don't even feel as if I'm the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's?

I make such a good statistic, somebody should study me now; somebody's gotta be interested in how I feel, just cause I'm here, and I'm real.

Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.

You have to look inside yourself and you have to say, well, what am I about? Why does anyone need this? Why does anyone need a 'Tom Ford' jacket? What do I believe in?

If there is any characteristic that is distinctly human, it is the capability for reflective self-consciousness.

Never forget who you are, little star.

She announced her age right away, for children consider their ages every bit as important as their names.

When I look for my existence I do not look for it in myself.

At that moment I was sure. That I belonged in my skin. That my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and I loved them and what they could do.

In my very own self, I am part of my family.

If I were a chocolate I'd eat myself. Seriously, we're all interested in ourselves and what other people are saying about us to some extent.

But truly, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

Individualization does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself.

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.'

The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in relation to Caius, but not to him at all.

Do you even recognize your own consciousness?

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

And why should he interest himself at all in my moral and intellectual capacities: what is it to him what I think and feel?' I asked myself. And my heart throbbed in answer to the question.

at this point I meet Me face to face. I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.

You can only be connected to others if you are connected to yourself and the truth inside.

You are what you think ... geez, that's frightening.

I think the work is always going to be much better when it's important and personal to you.