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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

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
Assuredly
Accounts
Authority
Science

More quotes by William James

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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
William James
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
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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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
William James
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There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
William James
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But facts are facts, and if we only get enough of them theyare sure to combine.
William James
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.
William James
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Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
William James
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A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
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
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The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.
William James
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The strenuous life tastes better
William James
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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
William James
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
William James
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness.
William James
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
William James