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

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Knowledge about life is one thing effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
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An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations and, second, on their number.
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
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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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If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
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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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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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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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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
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The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
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From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
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