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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.

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
Wish
Crow
Black
Upset
Shows
Seek
Enough
Prove
Single
Law
Show
Crows
White
Mustn

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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
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It is your friends who make your world.
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There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.
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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.
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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
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Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
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What holds attention determines action.
William James
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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
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Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
William James
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The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
William James
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
William James
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Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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