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No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.

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
Success
Sentiments
Opportunity
Concrete
Character
Possess
May
Entirely
Unaffected
Better
Remain
Reservoir
Matter
Advantage
Reservoirs
Every
Full
Maxims
Good
Taken
Uplifting

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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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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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But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
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Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
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A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
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With no attempt there can be no failure with no failure no humiliation.
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
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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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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
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Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
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The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
William James