Quote

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

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
Every
Fate
Strokes
Good
Virtue
Scar
Never
Evil
Strict
Character
Smallest
Fates
Littles
Vice
Wiped
Ever
Vices
Stroke
Little
Scientific
Undone
Nothing
Leaves
Spinning

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We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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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.
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
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There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
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Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
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There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
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No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
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So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.
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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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All religions begin with the cry Help.
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It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
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Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
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Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
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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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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs
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We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
William James