William James Quotes
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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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.
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The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
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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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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
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The art of remembering is the art of thinking. When we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall.
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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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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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Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
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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.
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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
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We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.
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If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
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In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
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The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.
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Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.
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Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
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The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity , with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.
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Religion is the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
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Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.