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I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

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
Already
Lose
Loses
Pretension
Doubt
Wholly
Rather
Disorder
Fear
Lover
Truth
Possess
Lovers

More quotes by William James

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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
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From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
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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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A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.
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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
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Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
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History is a bath of blood.
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
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If you want a confidence, act as if you already have it. Try the as if technique.
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Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
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Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
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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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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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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
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Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
William James