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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

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
Depends
Worth
Living
Life
Liver
Humorous
Philosophical

More quotes by William James

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There is a voice inside which speaks and says, This is the real me!
William James
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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
William James
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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
William James
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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
William James
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O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
William James
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If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
William James
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The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
William James
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
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'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
William James
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Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
William James
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The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
William James
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
William James
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
William James
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So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
William James
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'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
William James
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
William James
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In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.
William James
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Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
William James
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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
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