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

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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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Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all.
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You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
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So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.
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If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
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With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
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I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
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Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.
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Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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The education of attention would be an education par excellence
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Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.
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