Quote

So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.

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
Wells
Flight
Well
Sky
Take
Bird
Whole
Begin
Fluently
Children
Reading
Effortlessly
World
Read
Literacy
Learn
Worlds
Young
Birds

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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
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The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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The strenuous life tastes better
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I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
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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.
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Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
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Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa!
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I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
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The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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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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It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
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The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
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