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The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.

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
Law
Exclusively
Individual
Accommodate
Process
Convenience
Business
Processes
Science
Individuals
Cannot
God
Wholesale
Doe
Laws
Retail
Must
Universal
Recognizes

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Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!
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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.
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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
William James
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
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Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
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If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
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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.
William James
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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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Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.
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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
William James
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James
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Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
William James