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If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

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
Reality
Events
Past
Emotion
Change
Worry
Residing
Enough
System
Worrying
Different
Feeling
Event
Long
Future
Worried
Believe
Feelings
Planet
Another
Planets

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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new.
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Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
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Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.
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The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
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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.
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
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To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
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There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.
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The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
William James
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
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We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.
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Individuality is founded in feeling and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
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