The best phrases of William James (1842-1910), the founder of functional psychology and one of the most important psychologists in history. Apart from his enormous role in developing a more practical psychology (pragmatism), he left us many motivational phrases.
His book Principles of Psychology is considered one of the most important works in the history of psychology. You may also be interested in these phrases of famous psychologists.
-If you want a quality, act as if you already have it.
-The habit is the great flywheel of inertia that moves society, its most valuable agent of conservation.
- Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.
-If you are concerned enough about a result, you will certainly achieve it.
-Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcome the consequences of any misfortune.
-It is our attitude at the beginning of something difficult, more than anything else, that will affect a successful outcome.
-The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
-The deepest principle of human nature is the desire to be appreciated.
-Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
-Studying the abnormal is the best way to understand the normal.
-Large emergencies and crises show us that our vital resources are greater than we had assumed.
- Believe that life is worth living and that belief will help create the fact.
-Belief creates the actual fact.
-Is life worth living? It all depends on the player.
-Nothing is as tiring as eternally leaving a task unfinished.
-Everyone should do at least two things they hate every day, just for practicing.
-The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
-The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
-Whoever refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as if they tried and failed.
-Begin to be now what you will be from now on.
-Many people think they are thinking when they are reorganizing their prejudices.
-The most immovable barrier in nature is the one between the thought of one man and that of another.
-There is no greater lie than the truth misunderstood.
-When we must make a choice and we do not make it, that is already a choice.
-Wherever you are from, it is your own friends who make your world.
-A paradise of inner tranquility seems to be the result of faith.
-There is only one cause of human failure. And it is the lack of faith of man in himself.
-I don't sing because I'm happy, I'm happy because I sing.
-If an organism fails to fulfill its potential, it becomes sick.
-To change life: start immediately. Do it ostentatiously.
-When you have to make a decision and you don't take it, it is in itself a decision.
-An idea, to be suggestive, must reach the individual in the form of revelation.
-Genio means little more than the ability to perceive in an unusual way.
-The greatest use of a life is to spend it in something that lasts longer than it.
-Common sense and sense of humor are the same although moving at different speeds. Common sense is like a sense of humor but dancing.
-Success or failure depends more on attitude than ability. Successful men act like they've achieved something or enjoyed something. Act, look, feel, like you are successful and you will see impressive results.
-If you think that feeling bad or worrying will change the past or the future, you are living on another planet with a different reality.
-We are ready to be wild for some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad man is the choice of cause.
-Whenever you are in a conflict with someone, there is a factor that can make the difference between damaging the relationship or reinforcing it. That factor is attitude.
-It seems that action is followed by emotion, but in reality action and feeling go together; and by regulating action, which is under the control of the will, we can directly regulate emotion.
-In the depth of the mind we know what we should be doing but somehow we cannot begin.
-The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The momentum dies without the sympathy of the community.
-It is always wrong, anywhere, and for anyone, to believe something without sufficient evidence.
-Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.
-For most of us, over thirty, character has established itself like plaster, and will never soften again.
-The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves it.
-To be a real philosopher, all that is necessary is to hate the way of thinking of another.
-The ideas obtained by man before the age of twenty-five are practically the only ideas they can have in their lives.
-Whenever two people meet, there are six people present. How each person sees herself, how one person sees the other and each person as she really is.
-If you can change your mind you can change your life.
-We are like islands in the sea, separated from the surface but connected in the depth.
-Anything that you can hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
-To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past pass, expand our sense of now, and dissolve fear from our minds.
-Our vision of the world is shaped by what we decide to listen to.
-The sense of humor is a philosophical state of mind; it seems to say to nature that we do not take her more seriously than she takes us.
-Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
-Compared to what we should, we are half awake.
- As a rule we do not believe in the facts and theories for which we have no use.
-The greatest thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
-The intellectual life of man consists almost entirely in the substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally originated.
-Individuality surpasses all classification, however, we insist on classifying each person we meet under a general criterion.
-Strenuous life tastes better.
-A difference that makes no difference is not a difference.
-My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those things that I notice shape my mind.
-Error is necessary to establish the truth, just as a dark background is required to display the brightness of an image.
-The greatest enemy of any of our truths can be the rest of our truths.