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Events are influenced by our very great desires.

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
Influenced
Desires
Events
Desire
Great

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Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.
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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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Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
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Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
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The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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Lets take full advantage of this discovery
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Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
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In the last analysis, then, we believe that we all know and think about and talk about the same world because we believe our PERCEPTS are possessed by us in common
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As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
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