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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

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
Means
Brilliance
Science
Faculty
Littles
Innovation
Little
Habit
Mean
Creativity
Way
Genius
Imagination
Creative
Perceiving

More quotes by William James

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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
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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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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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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
William James
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There is a voice inside which speaks and says, This is the real me!
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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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
William James
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Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
William James
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
William James
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As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
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Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
William James
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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
William James
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We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
William James
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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
William James
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
William James