William James Quotes
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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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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
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When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.
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But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
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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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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.
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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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History is a bath of blood.
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... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted; countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.
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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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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
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The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.