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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.

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
Unhappiness
Painful
Ugly
Attitude
Mean

More quotes by William James

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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
William James
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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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Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
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How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
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Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.
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Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
William James
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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Time itself comes in drops.
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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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Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
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To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.
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