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

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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
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The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
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It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
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Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
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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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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
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All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride.
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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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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
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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.
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The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
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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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I don't sing because I'm happy I'm happy because I sing.
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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
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