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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.

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
Well
Plaster
Never
Plasters
Like
Soften
World
Birthday
Thirty
Age
Character
Wells

More quotes by William James

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Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
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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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
William James
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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
William James
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
William James
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We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
William James
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We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.
William James
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Man lives for science as well as bread.
William James
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The education of attention would be an education par excellence
William James
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...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
William James
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Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
William James
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
William James
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I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
William James
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The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
William James
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
William James
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Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
William James
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
William James
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To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.
William James