Date: 1892, 1899

"Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, an...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"If, for instance, you hear me call out A, B, C, it is ten to one that you will react on the impression by inwardly or outwardly articulating D, E, F. The impression arouses its old associates; they go out to meet it; it is received by them, recognized by the mind as 'the beginning of the alphabe...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"In admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas."

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1892, 1899

"The flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence."

— James, William (1842-1910)

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: 1900, 1901

"Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,--thin, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil?"

— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)

Date: 1900, 1901

"Deep in our souls we should hear the strains of our inner life’s unbroken melody,--a music that is ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintive and always original."

— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)

Date: 1900, 1901

"We move amidst generalities and symbols, as within a tilt-yard in which our force is effectively pitted against other forces; and fascinated by action, tempted by it, for our own good, on to the field it has selected, we live in a zone midway between things and ourselves, externally to things, e...

— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)