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The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
William James -
To change one's life: a. Start immediately b. B. Do it flamboyantly c. No exceptions Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted.
William James
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James -
Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
William James -
We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self..."
William James -
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
William James -
When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
William James -
There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
William James
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Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.
William James -
In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.
William James -
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
William James -
I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James -
An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: "There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important." This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.
William James -
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
William James
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Equality is attainable as long as you are part of the majority.
William James -
Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
William James -
Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all.
William James -
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
William James -
Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
William James -
Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
William James
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Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'.
William James -
Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James -
Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
William James -
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.
William James