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Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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
Soul
Gratitude
Things
Blame
Modifies
Love
Stronger
Determines
Think
Habit
Govern
Thinking
Environment
Surroundings
Life
Common
Mindfulness
Upon
Lovely
Doe
Determine
More quotes by William James
Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
William James
To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
William James
The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.
William James
Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.
William James
... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
William James
A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
William James
It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
William James
The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.
William James
The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
William James
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
William James
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
William James
There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
William James
The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
William James
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
William James
All religions begin with the cry Help.
William James
Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
William James
No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
William James
The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
William James
Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
William James
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
William James
