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

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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
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The war-function has grasped us so far but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
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The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
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The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
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All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride.
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A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
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I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
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What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
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The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.
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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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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.
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We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
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Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
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