William James Quotes
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Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition
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Effort is a measure of a Man.
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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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There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
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We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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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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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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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
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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!
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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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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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
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Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
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A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.