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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

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
Sadness
Misery
Decision
Indecisive
Inspirational
Indecision
Human
Habitual
Humans
Statistics
Nothing
Miserable
Philosophical

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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
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The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
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As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
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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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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
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Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
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Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
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All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.
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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.
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Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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