Quote

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition

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
Life
Politics
Street
Scramble
Anyone
Inner
Deem
Poor
Ambition
Simplify
Making
Save
Lacking
Money
General
Despise
Political
Streets
Join
Order
Afraid
Literally
Elects
Doe
Poverty
Grown
Pant

More quotes by William James

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Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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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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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
William James
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If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
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Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
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The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
William James
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The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
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Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
William James
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
William James
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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.
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There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
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The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
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There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
William James