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Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.

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
Thing
Sought
Cheap
Price
Supreme
Pay
Quality
Whatever

More quotes by William James

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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
William James
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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
William James
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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.
William James
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
William James
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To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
William James
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Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
William James
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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.
William James
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To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
William James
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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
William James
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Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
William James
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As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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Man lives for science as well as bread.
William James
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If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
William James
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Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
William James
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.
William James
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Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection.
William James
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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!
William James
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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
William James
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The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
William James
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
William James