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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I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because I'm recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because I'm concentrating on what the character is going through.
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I've seen public opinion shift like the wind and put out the very fire it lighted.
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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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The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.
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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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By New Year's Eve, we're so done going out we usually just light a fire, play one last card game, and watch the ball drop in our jammies.
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I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.
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Most of life is grey, with a little tiny bit of black and white.
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Out of the chaos of post-Roman Dark Age Britain, the English had created the world's first nation-state: One king, one country, one church, one currency, one language and a single unified representative national administration. Never again in England would sovereignty descend to the merely regional level. Never again would the idea of England and the unity of England ever be challenged.
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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.
