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

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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
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Truth is something that happens to an idea.
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
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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.
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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.
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Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.
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From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
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Effort is a measure of a Man.
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
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... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
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Knowledge about life is one thing effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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But when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, whilst others simply cannot. And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper spring of human personality to conduct the task.
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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
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The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
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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.
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