William James Quotes
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Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all.
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The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience; and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.
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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self..."
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If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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Who does not see that we are likely to ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider their place in any more general series, and treating them as if they were outside of nature's order altogether?
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In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.
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Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors: the individual ... bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
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As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them.
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In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common
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As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!