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We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

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
Seeing
Cats
Books
Dogs
Cat
Universe
Library
May
Hearing
Book
Dog
Conversation
Inkling
Meaning
Libraries

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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
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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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The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.
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Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
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There are 3 rules to follow if you want to change (1) Start immediately, (2) Do it flamboyantly, (3) No exceptions.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
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The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.
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Time itself comes in drops.
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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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Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.
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Individuality is founded in feeling and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
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An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete... Its motor consequences are what clinch it.
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Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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