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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.

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
View
Views
Hear
World
Shaped
Decide
Truly

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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
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Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection.
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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
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What a teacher needs to know about psychology might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.
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Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
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Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
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A thing is important if anyone think it important.
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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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When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
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As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
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Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
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If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
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I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.
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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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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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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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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
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