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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.

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
Littles
Little
Every
Gratuitous
Faculty
Exercise
Effort
Alive
Keep

More quotes by William James

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Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
William James
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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
William James
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The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
William James
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You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
William James
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The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing.
William James
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How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.
William James
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The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
William James
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Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
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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No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
William James
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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
William James
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Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
William James
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
William James
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Science can tell us what exists but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
William James
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
William James
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The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
William James
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
William James
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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.
William James
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
William James
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
William James