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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

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
Education
Teach
Good
Men
Aim
Philosophical
College

More quotes by William James

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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James
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To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
William James
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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
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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As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them.
William James
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No decision is, in itself, a decision.
William James
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We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
William James
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
William James
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Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa!
William James
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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
William James
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... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
William James
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
William James
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Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.
William James
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
William James
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Our beliefs are really rules for action.
William James
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
William James
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An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete... Its motor consequences are what clinch it.
William James
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Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
William James
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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
William James