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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
Optimism
Leads
Weakness
Power
Pessimistic
Pessimism
Uplifting
Optimistic

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... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
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Effort is a measure of a Man.
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You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
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To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
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But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
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In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
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The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.
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The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
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