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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
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
Real
Voice
Seek
Business
Follow
Vitally
Comes
Along
Attribute
Inspirational
Journey
Authenticity
Makes
Attitude
Attributes
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Says
Deeply
Feel
Particular
Mental
Feels
Alive
Inner
More quotes by William James
All religions begin with the cry Help.
William James
I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives
William James
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
William James
We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
William James
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
Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
William James
General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
William James
Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
Act the part and you will become the part.
William James
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
William James
There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
William James
...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
William James
The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
William James
We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
William James
A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.
William James
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.
William James
If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.
William James
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
Individuality is founded in feeling and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
William James
Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
William James