William James Psychology Quotations

Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions.

I now perceive one immense omission in my psychology -- the deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated.

It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.

I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.

The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.

In teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.

The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.