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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.

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
Hear
Sympathy
Justice
Appeals
Politics
Dealing
Lying
Folly
Crocodiles
Political
Reasonable
Magnanimity
Truth
Argument
Persuasion
Human
Worse
Misunderstood
Humans
Challenges
Arguments

More quotes by William James

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If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
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Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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Choose a self and stand by it.
William James
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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
William James
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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.
William James
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James
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Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
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We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.
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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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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Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
William James
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The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James
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As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them.
William James
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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
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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.
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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The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
William James
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
William James