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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
Consciousness
Systems
Numbers
Complexes
Philosophy
Complex
Takes
Educational
Literature
Field
Place
Fields
Ideas
Number
Volition
Depends
Conflicting

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Truth is something that happens to an idea.
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
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To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
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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 deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
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An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations and, second, on their number.
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We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
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Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
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If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
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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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... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
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A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
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There are 3 rules to follow if you want to change (1) Start immediately, (2) Do it flamboyantly, (3) No exceptions.
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Every claim creates an obligation.
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