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The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.

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
Deepest
Breasts
Longing
Appreciation
Creativity
Desire
Human
Humans
Breast

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Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.
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Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
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How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.
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Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
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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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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
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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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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.
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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.
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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.
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The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.
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Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
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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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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
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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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