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Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.

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
Power
Pessimistic
Pessimism
Uplifting
Optimistic
Optimism
Leads
Weakness

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Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
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The war-function has grasped us so far but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
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Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
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I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
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Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
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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.
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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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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I will act as if I do make a difference.
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Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
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On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
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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.
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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!
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