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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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From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
William James
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Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
William James
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Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
William James
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To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.
William James
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We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.
William James
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All religions begin with the cry Help.
William James
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
William James
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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
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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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
William James
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There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
William James
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
William James
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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
William James
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The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
William James
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First... a new theory is attacked as absurd then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
William James
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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
William James
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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.
William James