Quote

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

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
Live
Results
Come
Hours
Enough
Faith
Risking
Thing
Often
Beforehand
Life
Makes
Pessimism
Another
Optimism
True
Hour
Persons
Result

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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
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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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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
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Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
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The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
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An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
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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.
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There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.
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There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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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.
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Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
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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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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
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The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
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What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
William James