Quote

The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

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
Individual
Horror
Lunatic
Facts
Material
Visions
Every
Materials
Founded
Civilization
Agony
Goes
Helpless
Vision
Drawn
Existence
Daily
Spasm
Fact
Lonely
Shambles

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We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
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We are mere bundles of habits.
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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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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
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A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.
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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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In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.
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Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
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Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
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In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.
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