A Quote by William James

We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.

William James

Quote Topics

Copiers Creatures Our Our Past Past Selves

Quote Author

William James
American - Philosopher
January 11, 1842 - August 26, 1910

We go to the past to lay the blame - since the past can't argue. We go to our past selves to account for our present miseries.

Glen Duncan

Perhaps we've got so involved in the false selves we project on social media that we've forgotten that our real selves, our private selves, are different, are worth saving.

Frankie Boyle

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

Wynton Marsalis

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.

Anais Nin

We're very physical creatures, and we worry about how we look sometimes more than our spiritual selves

Smokey Robinson

We're very physical creatures, and we worry about how we look sometimes more than our spiritual selves.

Smokey Robinson

Can we ignore what is going on around us, can we disconnect ourselves, our own material situation, our spiritual selves, who we are, can we disconnect that from history and the social context of our lives? The older I get, the more I'm convinced that we cannot, that we are social creatures.

Martin Donovan

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.

R. D. Laing

We were not always 70, or rather our 70 is an accumulation of all the other ways we were. Our 5-year-old selves became our 10-year-old selves, and so on and on; and if we unpack our selves, the full album appears. Every moment is a part of the following moment, and we are all a continuum.

Anne Roiphe

We're killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses.

Lauren Oliver

Choice is the key, because human beings are the only creatures who can choose to evolve, who can shape their destiny. Furthermore, we have been given the gift of "self-awareness," which allows us to step back into our true selves to observe and use our brains to create the world we wish to live in.

Deepak Chopra

We cannot remain consistent with the world save by growing inconsistent with our past selves.

Havelock Ellis

I'd love to be a Bond girl. I mean, if you're going to be stereotyped, there are worse things to be stereotyped as.

Jordana Brewster

I think I'm going to be stereotyped forever, but I'm not scared of being stereotyped.

Sofia Vergara

It's been well documented how we start to believe in our virtual or digital selves more than our real selves, but it's strange to think that human behaviour hasn't really changed at all since that legend was created.