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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
Philosophical
Pursuit
Philosophy
Human
Humans
Pursuits
Trivial
Sublime

More quotes by William James

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Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
William James
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...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
William James
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Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life
William James
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Choose a self and stand by it.
William James
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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
William James
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
William James
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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
William James
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
William James
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Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
William James
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So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
William James
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I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
William James
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An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
William James
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You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
William James
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Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
William James
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There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James
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Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
William James
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Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.
William James
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
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The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
William James
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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James