The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
Interpretation
Genius involves the ability to discern what is truly important and ignore the irrelevant.
William James highlights that true genius lies in the capacity to recognize what should be prioritized in thought and action, suggesting that the ability to overlook trivial matters is as crucial as any intellectual capability. This insight calls for a focus on essentials, promoting efficiency and clarity in decision-making.
In practice
This quote can inspire students to concentrate on what truly matters in their studies.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.
Most things don't work out as expected, but what happens instead often turns out to be the good stuff.
The way people look at me these days - that's the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who've attained a certain position are human.
Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
You wake up one day and suddenly realize that your youth is behind you, even though you're still young at heart.
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