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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
Things
Literally
Appear
Shall
Sort
Acting
Inhabit
Universe
Attending
Action
Chooses
Way
Optimistic

More quotes by William James

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If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.
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A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
William James
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What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
William James
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Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
William James
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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
William James
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
William James
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An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: There is very little difference between one man and another but what little there is, is very important. This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.
William James
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It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
William James
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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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The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
William James
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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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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
William James
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Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.
William James
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The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
William James
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James
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There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
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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.
William James