William James Quotes
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The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
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Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
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We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
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Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
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Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
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Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
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Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
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I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)
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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
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The perfection of rottenness.
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True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
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Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
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Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
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It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
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No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
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Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
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Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.