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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.

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
True
Philosophical
Human
Lack
Humans
Failure
Self
Failing
Men
Cause
Causes
Faith
Inspirational
Insightful

More quotes by William James

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Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
William James
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Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.
William James
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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
William James
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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
William James
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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
William James
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It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.
William James
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If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.
William James
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Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
William James
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
William James
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You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
William James
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Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
William James
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Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.
William James
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
William James
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The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.
William James
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
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The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.
William James
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Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.
William James
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To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
William James
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If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
William James
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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.
William James