William James Quotes
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
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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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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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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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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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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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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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Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
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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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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
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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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Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
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Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
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Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
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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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Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
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In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.