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The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing.

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
Literature
Educational
Interesting
Object
Moment
Connected
Moments
Fortune
Self
Objects
Thing
Personal
Forthwith
Men
Becomes
Fortunes
Philosophy
Accordingly

More quotes by William James

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Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.
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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
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.
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Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
William James
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
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In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.
William James
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Evil is a disease and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
William James
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All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.
William James
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An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
William James
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There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
William James
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Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
William James
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Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
William James
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I don't sing because I'm happy I'm happy because I sing.
William James
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Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
William James
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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.
William James
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
William James
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Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections
William James