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Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

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
Truth
Interaction
Copies
Advance
Sensible
Guide
Particulars
Guides
Copy
Thoughts
Beneficial
Whether
Occur

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Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
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Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
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Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
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An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
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Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
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That which is most personal, is most interesting.
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
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Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
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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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Time itself comes in drops.
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The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
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No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
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The word 'cause' is an altar to an unknown god.
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
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Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
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The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
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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.
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