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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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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Getting
Reasoning
Next
Background
Cannot
Backgrounds
Person
Philosophical
Meanwhile
Trying
Somehow
Answering
Mind
Step
Dressing
Make
Ought
Surfing
Start
Spoken

More quotes by William James

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A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
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What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.
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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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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.
William James
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a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries
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Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
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The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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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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Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
William James
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A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new.
William James
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How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?
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Choose a self and stand by it.
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There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James