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We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.

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
Laughter
Laugh
Laughing
Happiness
Happy

More quotes by William James

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In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
William James
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
William James
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.
William James
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James
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A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
William James
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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
William James
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I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.
William James
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
William James
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So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.
William James
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
William James
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But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
William James
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
William James
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
William James
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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
William James
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
William James
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Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
William James