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

More quotes by William James

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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
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... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.
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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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Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.
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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
William James
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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
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The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
William James
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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
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Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.
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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.
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No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
William James
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
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We are mere bundles of habits.
William James
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... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
William James
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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