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We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.

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
Particular
Quality
Friends
Tell
Doe
Candor
Tolerate
Ass
Qualities

More quotes by William James

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My experience is what I agree to attend to.
William James
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Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
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Individuality is founded in feeling and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
William James
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
William James
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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
William James
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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
William James
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
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It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.
William James
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Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
William James
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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
William James
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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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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
William James
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Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
William James
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Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.
William James
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
William James
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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
William James
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I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
William James