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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.

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
Pleasure
Riches
Natural
Goods
Take
Breath
Love
Breaths
Wings
Fame
Vanish
Youth
Perish
Health
Cheat

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I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
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If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
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All religions begin with the cry Help.
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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
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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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Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
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Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
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If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!
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Individuality is founded in feeling
William James