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To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.

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
Mean
Reported
Added
Awareness
Conscious
Simply
Known
Means

More quotes by William James

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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
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Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
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You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.
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The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time
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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
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There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.
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There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
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The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
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An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James