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

More quotes by William James

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Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
William James
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'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
William James
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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.
William James
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But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
William James
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Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
William James
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You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
William James
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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
William James
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
William James
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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
William James
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As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them.
William James
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
William James
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Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
William James
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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.
William James
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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
William James
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Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
William James
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There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
William James
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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
William James
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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
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.
William James
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James