William James Quotes
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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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Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
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General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
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If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!
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The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
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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 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.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.
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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
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I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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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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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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A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
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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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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.