William James Quotes
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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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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
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That reality is 'independent' means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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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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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
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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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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
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No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
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Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
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But when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, whilst others simply cannot. And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper spring of human personality to conduct the task.
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Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life
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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
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But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
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From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.