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Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
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
Errors
Lightness
Certain
Healthier
Seems
Excessive
Heart
Caution
Things
Solemn
Carefulness
World
Behalf
Incur
Surely
Nervousness
Spite
Awfully
More quotes by William James
Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
William James
If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
William James
We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
William James
Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
William James
Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
William James
If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
William James
There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
William James
The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.
William James
Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
William James
Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
William James
All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
William James
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
William James
The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
William James
...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
William James
Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.
William James
The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
William James
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
William James
An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.
William James
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
William James