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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.

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
Life
Organic
Occasion
Tenderness
Occasions
Surprise
Joyousness
Need
Saintly
Needs
Affinity
Way
Companionship

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In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.
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Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
William James
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We can act as if there were a God feel as if we were free consider Nature as if she were full of special designs lay plans as if we were to be immortal and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
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You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.
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The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.
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My experience is what I agree to attend to.
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
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What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
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It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
William James
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The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
William James
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There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James
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All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
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The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
William James
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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
William James