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

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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
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Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
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How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
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If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
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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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My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
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Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
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Events are influenced by our very great desires.
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
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The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind
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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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Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
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a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries
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Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
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The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
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