William James Quotes

Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.

Some people spend their time reasoning and thinking out everything, and so anything that cannot be fully understood, they will not accept. We call these people 'intellectuals.'

Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.

Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.

Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers.

I'd love to go back to school for philosophy. I love philosophy, so I'm always reading philosophy books, annoying my girlfriend with that type of stuff.

The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.

It is, from another angle, an attack on requiring proof in philosophy. And it's also the case, I guess, that my temperament is to like interesting, new, bold ideas, and to try and generate them.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.

The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.

The great benefit of philosophy, which is also its great weakness, is that all its steps are taken in the spirit of doubt.

I want to show people it's not elitist to be a deep thinker.

If you've never met a student from the University of Chicago, I'll describe him to you. If you give him a glass of water, he says, 'This is a glass of water. But is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water?' And eventually he dies of thirst.

Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect... What is philosophy today... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?

However good an argument in philosophy may happen to be, it is generally not good enough.

I think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.

What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.

Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

In praising science, it does not follow that we must adopt the very poor philosophies which scientific men have constructed. In philosophy they have much more to learn than to teach.

Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.