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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

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
Study
Understanding
Best
Way
Psychiatry
Abnormal
Philosophical
Normal

More quotes by William James

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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
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We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
William James
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As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
William James
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
William James
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Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
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Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.
William James
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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
William James
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Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
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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Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
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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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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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
William James
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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.
William James
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Individuality is founded in feeling
William James
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If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.
William James
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The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.
William James
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A thing is important if anyone think it important.
William James
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Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
William James
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
William James