William James Quotes
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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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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Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
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The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
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The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.
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In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.
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In business for yourself, not by yourself.
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Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
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All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
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Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.
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The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
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Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
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Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
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The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.