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How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.

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
Upon
Precipitate
Never
Moment
Entered
Hate
Persist
Moments
Psychological
Change
Minds
Simply
Might
Courses
Many
Course
Mind

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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
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No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
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Men habitually use only a small part of the power which they actually possess.
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No decision is, in itself, a decision.
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You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.
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To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
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Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.
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Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.
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I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
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Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
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What holds attention determines action.
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
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The word 'cause' is an altar to an unknown god.
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Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection.
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All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
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