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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.

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
Would
Hold
Thinking
Law
Like
Keep
Form
Psychology
Become
Picture
Enough
Exactly
Long
Soon
Mind
Military

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The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
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There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
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If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
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My experience is what I agree to attend to.
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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
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Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
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Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
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The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
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Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
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No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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The perfection of rottenness.
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I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)
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Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
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A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
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In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.
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If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.
William James