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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.

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
Either
Free
Less
Lives
Inspirational
Life
Based

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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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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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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
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The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
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What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
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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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My experience is what I agree to attend to.
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
William James
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James
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You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.
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We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
William James
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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
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Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
William James
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It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
William James
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This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.
William James