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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
Half
Compared
Awake
Philosophical
Ought
Philosophy

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I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
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The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.
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The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time
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Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.
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Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
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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.
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Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
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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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If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
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Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
William James
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With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
William James
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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
William James