Date: 1892, 1899

"But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, and be our stock of them large or small, they are all we have to work with."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"The more adequate the stock of ideas, the more 'able' is the man, the more uniformly appropriate is his behavior likely to be."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"This mental escort which the mind supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind's ready-made stock."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"It is to be hoped that we all have some friend, perhaps more often feminine than masculine, and young than old, whose soul is of this sky-blue tint, whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions, who can think no ill of man or God...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"Such fleeting aspirations are mere 'velleitates,' whimsies. They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind and the real self of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely different system."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanical equilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually check or reinforce one another."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1904

"This is why I called our experiences, taken all together, a quasi-chaos."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1904

"The objective nucleus of every man's experience, his own body, is, it is true, a continuous percept."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1904

The empiricist universe is "like one of those dried human heads with which the Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every description float and dangle from it, and, save that they terminate in...

— James, William (1842-1910)