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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
Experiences
Thinks
Relation
Memory
Memories
Experience
Weaves
Best
Systematic
Thinking
Relations

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An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
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If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
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He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
William James
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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
William James
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Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
William James
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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
William James
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One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.
William James
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Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.
William James
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The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.
William James
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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
William James
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
William James
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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.
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
William James
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'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
William James
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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
William James
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In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.
William James