The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2)

self-and-identity

• Self-esteem is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities — with no attempt there can be no failure, with no failure no humiliation.

  PPJW-RC-247

• The world we feel and live in is that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of primordial chaos, like sculptors.

  PPJW-RC-230

mind-and-cognition

• Strange to say, so patent a fact as the perpetual presence of selective attention has received hardly any notice from psychologists of the English empiricist school.

  PPJW-RC-321

• Consciousness is at all times primarily a selecting agency — its efficacy over passive sensation inductively proved by the defects it compensates.

  PPJW-RC-115

• Nerve-currents propagate easiest through tracts already most in use — the psychological law of association is an effect of this physical fact.

  PP-RC-445

• The habit of articulating to one's self words seen or heard ought to deepen attention — experience shows that this is the case.

  PPJW-RC-356