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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.

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
Belief
Outcome
Success
Venture
Thing
Outcomes
Believe
Entrepreneur
Confidence
Assures
Beginning
Undertaking
Decision
Undertakings
Successful
Doubtful

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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
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Our beliefs are really rules for action.
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.
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The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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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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If you want a confidence, act as if you already have it. Try the as if technique.
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I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
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The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
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The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
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There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
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The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
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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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Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
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