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I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.

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
Determine
Perspective
Gentlemen
Philosophy
Determines
Interesting
Ladies
Important
Worlds
Thing
Gentleman
Way
Several
World
Philosopher

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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.
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Hogamus, higamous Man is polygamous Higamus, hogamous Woman monogamous.
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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.
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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
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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.
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You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
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Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.
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The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
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The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out.
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The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.
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Truth is something that happens to an idea.
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So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
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Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
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