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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

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
Unprofitable
Mates
Philosophy
Possible
Social
Men

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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
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It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
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The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.
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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.
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
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The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
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The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.
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All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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