Quote

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. 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
Thing
Creativity
Humor
Common
Speeds
Funny
Dancer
Moving
Speed
Sense
Dancing
Play
Laughter
Different
Dance

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We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
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Man, biologically considered ... is simply the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own kind.
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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
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Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
William James
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Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
William James
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With no attempt there can be no failure with no failure no humiliation.
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
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The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
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Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
William James
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Evil is a disease and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
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The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
William James
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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
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The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.
William James
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Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.
William James
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It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
William James
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My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
William James
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Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to keep by force of mere inertia.
William James