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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.

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
Think
Literature
Thinking
Belief
Endowed
Rather
Fitness
Freedom
Sustain
Firsts
Considering
First
Educational
Things
Inner
Would
Philosophy

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The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.
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We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
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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.
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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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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The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
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But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
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It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.
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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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Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.
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The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
William James
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If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
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