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A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.

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
Dancer
Dancing
Dance
Humor
Common
Sense
House

More quotes by William James

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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
William James
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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
William James
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Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
William James
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But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
William James
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
William James
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To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.
William James
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A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
William James
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The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
William James
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Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
William James
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Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James
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Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
William James
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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
William James
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
William James
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The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
William James
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Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
William James
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For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
William James
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With no attempt there can be no failure with no failure no humiliation.
William James
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Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa!
William James
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It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.
William James