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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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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
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Religions have approved themselves they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
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If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
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How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
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Truth happens to an idea
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What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.
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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.
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
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There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing
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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
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