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The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

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
Factor
Mind
Vital
Factors
Mental
Function
Progress
Inattention
Attention
Ignoring
Science

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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
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The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.
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Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections
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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
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In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.
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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.
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The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
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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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Belief creates the actual fact.
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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.
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The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, words, words, words, must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.
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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
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There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
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