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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.

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
Full
Indifferent
Individual
Righteousness
Social
Element
Largeness
Everything
Essential
Smitten
Essentials
Partiality
God
Adulation
Elements
Favorites
Vision
Lacks

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The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.
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I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
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We can act as if there were a God feel as if we were free consider Nature as if she were full of special designs lay plans as if we were to be immortal and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
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Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.
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The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
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Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
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Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
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Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
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For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
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That which is most personal, is most interesting.
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The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.
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...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
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Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
William James