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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.

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
Circumstance
Reveals
Circumstances
Doe
Character
Make

More quotes by William James

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As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them.
William James
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
William James
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
William James
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The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind
William James
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True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.
William James
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
William James
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What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
William James
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
William James
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
William James
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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
William James
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
William James
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The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
William James
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
William James
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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.
William James
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The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
William James
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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.
William James
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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.
William James
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Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
William James
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
William James
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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
William James