Quote

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

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
Tasks
Achievement
Fatiguing
Eternity
Procrastinator
Eternal
Procrastinating
Motivational
Procrastination
Nothing
Hanging
Task
Clever

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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
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The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
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All religions begin with the cry Help.
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
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Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
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Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
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As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
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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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The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.
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Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.
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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 intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.
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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
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