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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.

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
Movement
Simplifies
Happiness
Diminishes
Makes
Simplify
Life
Fatigue
Diminish
Movements
Accurate
Habit

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The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed
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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot
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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.
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A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
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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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No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
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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.
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In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.
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Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.
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Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life
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I don't sing because I'm happy I'm happy because I sing.
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Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
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