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

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Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
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...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
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Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
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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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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
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Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation.
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You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.
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Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
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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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'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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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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In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
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In business for yourself, not by yourself.
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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
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The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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