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Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.

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
Depends
Conflicting
Consciousness
Systems
Numbers
Complexes
Philosophy
Complex
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Educational
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Fields
Ideas
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Volition

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Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
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You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
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Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa!
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I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
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In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
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Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
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All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
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We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition
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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
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Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.
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If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
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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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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
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