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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association

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
Principles
Philosophy
Grasped
Literature
Astonishing
Many
Association
Operations
Educational
Explain
Mental

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The war-function has grasped us so far but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
William James
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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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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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
William James
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
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To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
William James
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
William James
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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
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It is your friends who make your world.
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No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
William James
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An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
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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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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
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The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
William James
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The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, words, words, words, must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.
William James
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The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
William James