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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

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
Great
Since
Something
Belief
Believe
Help
Make
Fact
Life
Living
Outlast
Use
Spend
Helping
Worth
Facts
Create

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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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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
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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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Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.
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Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
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The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
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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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In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.
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To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
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Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
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We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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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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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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
William James
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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
William James