Quote

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

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Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
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Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
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Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
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Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.
William James
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'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
William James
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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.
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We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
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All religions begin with the cry Help.
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Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.
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We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
William James
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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.
William James
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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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Our beliefs are really rules for action.
William James
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Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
William James