Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves . . . But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
- Topic: Thinking
- Location: Honduras, Roatan
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from William James
More Quotes from Honduras
More on Thinking
There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it.
You must try to observe yourself more and more objectively, to look at everything in yourself as though another person.
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.
I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn, as in doing it.
Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.
The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.
Factual evidence can never “prove” a hypothesis; it can only fail to disprove it, which is what we generally mean when we say, somewhat inexactly, that the hypothesis is “confirmed” by experience.
I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.
Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind.