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The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of training that take place there and the first-rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence.

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
Able
Exercise
Points
Remoter
Firsts
Teacher
Educational
Schoolroom
First
Philosophy
Provide
Keenness
Take
Literature
Opportunities
Occurrence
Must
Attention
Interests
Abundant
Important
Interest
Rate
Counted
Opportunity
Training
Voluntary
Place
Therefore
Awaken

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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
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Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
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If you want a confidence, act as if you already have it. Try the as if technique.
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You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.
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To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.
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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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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
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New habits can be launched.
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Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
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As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
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Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.
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This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.
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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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Time itself comes in drops.
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The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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Once a decision is reached, stop worrying and start working.
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The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.
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