Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.
You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher’s art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
What a teacher needs to know about psychology “might almost be written on the palm of one’s hand.”
The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.
A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock.
Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives.
Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one.
Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.
Footnotes – little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number.
In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.