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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.

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
Men
Thinking
Enormous
Room
Rooms
Consciousness
Small
Lives
House

More quotes by William James

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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
William James
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Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
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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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
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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There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
William James
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The strenuous life tastes better
William James
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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
William James
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
William James
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.
William James
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
William James
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
William James
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
William James
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
William James
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Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
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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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
William James
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True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
William James