"The great world, the background, in all of us, is the world of our beliefs. That is the world of the permanencies and the immensities." ~ William James

"A man's vision is the great fact about him."

"Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness."

"My experience is what I agree to attend to."

"I personally gave up the Absolute . . . I fully believe in taking moral holidays."

"What we say about reality depends on the perspective into which we throw it. The that of it is its own; but the what depends on the which; and the which depends on us."

"The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths."

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

"We have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will."

"Between what a man calls 'me' and what he simply calls 'mine' the line is difficult to draw."

"He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed."

"Whereever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant."

"The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing."

"The zone of individual differences is the zone of formative processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainly, the line where past and future meet." (Vygotsky's ZPD, anyone?)

"We have no sense for empty time."

"Perceptions and thinking are only there for behavior's sake."

"The best claim that a college education can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to accomplish for you, is this: that it should help you to know a good man when you see him."

"All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits."

"Strength of desire must be born in one; it cannot be taught."

"There is very little difference between one person and another, but, what little there is, is very important."

"The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth."

"The human animal lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum."

"We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause."

"Ideals ought to aim at the transformation of reality -- no less!"

"No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance."

"Only what we partly know already inspires us with a desire to know more."

"No impression without expression."

"Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits."

"Every school has its tone, moral and intellectual."

"In education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental."

"Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations."

"Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits."

"Theories [are] instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest."

"All our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma."

"In practical talk, a man's common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from eccentricity, his gumption, to use the vernacular word. In philosophy, it means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought."

"Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life." "In our dealings with natural phenomena the great point is to be able to foretell."

"The fundamental fact about our experience is that it is a process of change."

"Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one."

"Persons who are familiar with a conception move about so easily in it that they understand each other at a hint, and can converse without anxiously attending to their P's and Q's."

"The entire accumulated wealth of mankind -- language, arts, institutions, and sciences -- is passed from one generation to another by each generation simply imitating the last."

"How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young -- or slender."

"Many men and women would be happier today if they could once and for all abandon the notion of keeping up a musical self and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance."

"Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use."

"What an awful trade that of professor is - paid to talk, talk, talk! It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words."

"He isn't a genius, he's a professor - a being whose duty is to know everything, and to have his opinion about everything connected with his own view of the world."

"If a man's good for nothing else, he can at least teach philosophy."

In an address at Stanford university, James urged special treatment for outstanding faculty members: "They have to be treated tenderly. They don't need to live in superfluity; but they need freedom from harassing care; they need books and instruments; they are always overworking, so they need generous vacations; and above all things they need occasionally to travel far and wide in the interest of their soul's development."

"Certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big."

"The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated."
 

"To know psychology is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers."

"It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to the teacher."

"Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least."

"If the use of psychological principles thus be negative rather than positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great use, all the same. It certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. We know in advance, if we are psychologists, that certain methods will be wrong, so our psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us, moreover, more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back."

"The amount of [psychology] which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great . . . one may say, might almost be written on the palm of one's hand."

"The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad consciensce about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist."

"Our teachers are overworked already. Every one who adds a jot or tittle of unnecessary weight to their burder is a foe of education."

"The best teacher may be the poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact is more palpable than this."

"Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to a system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness."