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

More quotes by William James

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An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
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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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
William James
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... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.
William James
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
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The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
William James
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
William James
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The war-function has grasped us so far but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
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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.
William James
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Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
William James
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Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
William James
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Science can tell us what exists but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
William James
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
William James
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In business for yourself, not by yourself.
William James
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So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.
William James
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In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
William James
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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, 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.
William James
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James