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There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.

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
Lives
Two
Must
Participate
Lose
Loses
Spiritual
Natural

More quotes by William James

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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
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Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
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There is a voice inside which speaks and says, This is the real me!
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
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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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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
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...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
William James
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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
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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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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
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Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
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Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
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You can't out-perform your self-image.
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
William James
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
William James