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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.

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
Pursuits
Trivial
Sublime
Philosophical
Pursuit
Philosophy
Human
Humans

More quotes by William James

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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives
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The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.
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No decision is, in itself, a decision.
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
William James
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... the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.
William James
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It is your friends who make your world.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
William James
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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
William James
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
William James
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To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
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There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
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As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
William James
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If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.
William James
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
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The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.
William James
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
William James
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In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
William James
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Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
William James