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

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We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
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Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
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It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
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A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
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It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.
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So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.
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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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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
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The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.
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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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How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.
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The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
William James