Quote

The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.

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
Happiness
Cheerful
Speak
Spontaneous
Lost
Sovereign
Else
Conduct
Look
Round
Cheerfully
Nothing
Soon
Voluntary
Feel
Already
Cheerfulness
Make
Path
Occasion

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Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
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The education of attention would be an education par excellence
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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
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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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Knowledge about life is one thing effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
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The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
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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.
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
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To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
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Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
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But when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, whilst others simply cannot. And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper spring of human personality to conduct the task.
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History is a bath of blood.
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Religions have approved themselves they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
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The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
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Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
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