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My experience is what I agree to attend to.

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
Experience
Attend
Agree

More quotes by William James

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Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.
William James
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
William James
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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.
William James
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
William James
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Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
William James
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.
William James
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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
William James
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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.
William James
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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
William James
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
William James
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I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
William James
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How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.
William James
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Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mentalfire.
William James
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You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.
William James
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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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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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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
William James
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How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.
William James
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
William James