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...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.

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
Would
Abuse
Rearrangement
Bear
Preconceptions
Bears
Handling
Novel
Phenomena
Serious
Altogether
Science
Ignore
Way
Usual
Make
Witness

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My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.
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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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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.
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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
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Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out.
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Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
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There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
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We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
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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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We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
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The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
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As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time
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All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
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