Quote

If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.

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
Firsts
Torture
Scrape
Everything
Till
Aught
First
Shape
Offends
Good
Result
Ceaseless
Style
Rewriting
Results
Poke
Wrong
Crude
Comes
Toil
Objectified

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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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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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History is a bath of blood.
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If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
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In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.
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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
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Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
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The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
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I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.
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It is your friends who make your world.
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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
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The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.
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Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.
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