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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

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
Truth
Nothing
Repeated
Enough
Absurd
Believed
Belief
Often
Science
Cannot

More quotes by William James

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Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
William James
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The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
William James
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It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
William James
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
William James
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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
William James
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
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
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
William James
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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
William James
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Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
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You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.
William James
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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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.
William James
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
William James
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An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
William James
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Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
William James
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
William James
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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
William James
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Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
William James
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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
William James