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An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

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
Unless
Quality
Possible
Ethical
Whatever
Equally
Several
Ethics
Philosophical
Chosen

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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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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
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Evil is a disease and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
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Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
William James
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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot
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It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
William James
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Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
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First... a new theory is attacked as absurd then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
William James
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
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You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.
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Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.
William James
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The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
William James
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A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
William James
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Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
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Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation.
William James