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As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

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
Disbelieve
Theories
Rule
Theory
Belief
Use
Facts

More quotes by William James

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As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
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A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
William James
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
William James
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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
William James
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James
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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
William James
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Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
William James
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Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
William James
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Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
William James
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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
William James
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
William James
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Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
William James
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The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.
William James
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Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.
William James
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No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
William James
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If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.
William James
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Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes
William James
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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
William James
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New habits can be launched.
William James
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... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
William James