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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?

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
Dog
Universe
May
Libraries
Cats
Dogs
Cat
Library

More quotes by William James

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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
William James
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In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
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Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
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We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
William James
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Events are influenced by our very great desires.
William James
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
William James
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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
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A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
William James
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
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We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.
William James
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My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
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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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
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Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
William James
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In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
William James
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
William James