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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

William James

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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Wisdom
Experience
Overlook
Philosophical
Learning

More quotes by William James

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We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
William James
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My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
William James
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What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
William James
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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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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
William James
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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
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Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
William James
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It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
William James
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James
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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
William James
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If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
William James
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Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
William James
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Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
William James
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
William James
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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
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Lets take full advantage of this discovery
William James
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I will act as if I do make a difference.
William James
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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
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
William James