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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

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
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Universe
Attending
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Way
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Things
Literally
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It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.
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Effort is a measure of a Man.
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History is a bath of blood.
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The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, words, words, words, must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.
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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
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All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.
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We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
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The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
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We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
William James
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To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
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... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.
William James
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
William James
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Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.
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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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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
William James