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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.

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
Whether
Vacation
Force
Month
Feels
Holiday
Work
Possibly
Every
Months
Years
Taking
Men
Full
Like
Year

More quotes by William James

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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
William James
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Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
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We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
William James
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To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.
William James
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
William James
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The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of training that take place there and the first-rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence.
William James
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
William James
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From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
William James
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All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
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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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
William James
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Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
William James
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
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The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
William James
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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.
William James
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Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
William James
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
William James
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What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.
William James
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
William James
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The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.
William James