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There is but one unconditional commandment ... to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.

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
Volunteer
Unconditional
Commandments
Total
Bring
Universe
Helping
Commandment
Good
Largest

More quotes by William James

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Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
William James
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
William James
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To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
William James
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
William James
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...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
William James
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What a teacher needs to know about psychology might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.
William James
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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
William James
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There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker if sad, it must not scream or curse.
William James
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
William James
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One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.
William James
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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.
William James
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The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
William James
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New habits can be launched.
William James
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
William James
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An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.
William James
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The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
William James
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We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
William James
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On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
William James
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
William James
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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
William James