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Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.

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
Awake
Philosophical
Ought
Philosophy
Half
Compared

More quotes by William James

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The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
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Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
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The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
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We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
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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.
William James
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind
William James
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
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Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
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The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out.
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The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.
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A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
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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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The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
William James
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If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
William James
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An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
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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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