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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.

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
Religious
Facts
Neutralized
Religiousness
Devout
Temper
Esteem
Scientific
Almost

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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
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Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.
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The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
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a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries
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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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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
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No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
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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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It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.
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Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
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An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: There is very little difference between one man and another but what little there is, is very important. This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.
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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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My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
William James
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
William James