Quote

One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.

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
Feelings
Spent
Communion
Together
Laugh
Wrestling
Heart
Laughing
Inward
Bring
Demon
Sides
Closer
Enemy
Enemies
Feeling
Forgiveness
Uncharitable
Hours
Mental
Hearty

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Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
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Individuality is founded in feeling and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
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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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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
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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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The perfection of rottenness.
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If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
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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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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
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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.
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
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To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
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The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
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If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.
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