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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

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
Philosophical
Live
Tomorrow
Life
Trust
Ready
Call
Science
Truth
Falsehood
Today

More quotes by William James

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Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
William James
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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.
William James
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
William James
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
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So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.
William James
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
William James
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The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
William James
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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
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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You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.
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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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
William James
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
William James
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Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
William James
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A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
William James
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Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
William James
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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs
William James
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
William James
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There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
William James