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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.

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
Thinks
Relation
Memory
Memories
Experience
Weaves
Best
Systematic
Thinking
Relations
Experiences

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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
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The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing.
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Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
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Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
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The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.
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We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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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.
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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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What a teacher needs to know about psychology might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.
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All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
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A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
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Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
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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.
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... the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.
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So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
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