William James Quotes
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
Quotes to Explore
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In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world.
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In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.
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Money is in some respects life's fire: it is a very excellent servant, but a terrible master.
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Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.
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I never get scared making these kinds of movies because it's all make-believe, but I did cry when I saw the finished version of Man On Fire because it is so sad.
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Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.
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As I discovered music, especially Rock 'n Roll, new territory was opened to me. I was lured by the unbridled rhythm of this art form. It was like gasoline on the fire of my youthful spirit.
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I taught sixth grade for three and a half years.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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Poverty leads to hardship and failure.
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My friend was on dialysis for six years before he got a new kidney. I was on dialysis for eight months. I'm almost not even the typical person who has kidney failure.
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How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length.
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One day, when we were coming back from school, we saw this big cloud of smoke coming up, and all these fire-trucks in the yard. The garage was burning down. I was 14, and we'd lost everything.
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Must all of them and their families be physically abolished? Of course not? They must be 'liquidated' or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian masses.
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I am full of fire and passion. I am not ready yet for great concentration and passion.
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The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.
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Having the positive belief that it will all be O.K. just means that you hustle and make it work because failure is not even an option in your own mind.
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Failure is what we're all running from, we're always running toward success with failure at our back.
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I think the most surreal moment for me having been a kid who was on unemployment, was on food stamps - I'm not kidding you, to utter these words aloud is so surreal to me - but to say, "I had to give up my Super Bowl tickets for my all-expense paid research trip to Argentina's wine country," it was like, who's life is this? It was splendid, and the nice thing was that they renewed my contract for another year.
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The past is but the past of a beginning.
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The computer will live your life, listen to you and understand you better than humans can.
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I tell people, 'You can do this.' And they write back and say, 'You were right. I can do this. And now I believe I can do anything.'
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.
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Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
