William James

Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.

A thing is important if anyone think it important.

it has nothing to do with the time- and space-order in which the things have been experienced.

Evidently it is a pure outcome of our sense for apprehending serial increase; and, unlike the several propositions themselves which make up the series

over the heads of the intermediaries is the essential feature of the intellectual operation

is a very peculiar world, and plays right into logic's hands.

we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up

I must get up, this is ignominious

A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.

The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily …

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

[T]hings are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. ...[I]t pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again.

Setting the mind to remember... involves a continual minimal irradiation of excitement into paths which lead thereto... the continued presence of the thing in the 'fringe' of our consciousness. Letting the thing go involves withdrawal of …

Mr. Galton ...in his English Men of Science, has given ...cases showing individual variations in the type of memory... Some have it verbal. Others... for facts and figures, others for form. Most say... [it] must first be rationally …

[M]ost of what happens actually is forgotten.

A thing forgotten on one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after... saunter into the mind... [T]he sphere of possible recollection may be wider than …

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the …

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or …

Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever …

So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him.