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

More quotes by William James

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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
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Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
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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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We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition
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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
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The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
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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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The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
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The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
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A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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Time itself comes in drops.
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It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
William James