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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.

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
Grace
Religion
Order
Things
Unseen
Attempt
Harmony

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The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
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The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out.
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It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill.
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There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
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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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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
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Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.
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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs
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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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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
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In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
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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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