William James Quotes
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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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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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
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Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
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The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
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History is a bath of blood.
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If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.
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I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
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If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
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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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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
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Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do
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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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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs
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Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.