William James Quotes
The most violent revolutions in an individuals beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and ones own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.
Quotes to Explore
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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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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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We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
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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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Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
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Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides
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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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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
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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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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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The perfection of rottenness.
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How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.
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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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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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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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To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.