Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies โฆ and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to "keep" by force of mere inertia.
William JamesThe God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
William JamesThe union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
William JamesConsciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'.
William James