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For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.

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
Morality
Highest
Sort
Volunteers
Politics
Volunteer
War
Patriotism
Political
Cosmic
Also
Calls
Life
Service

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With no attempt there can be no failure with no failure no humiliation.
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O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
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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.
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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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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 art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
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You can't out-perform your self-image.
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
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If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
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The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
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My experience is what I agree to attend to.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.
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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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We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
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No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
William James