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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.

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
Trial
Trials
Genius
Democracy
Upon
Stills
Bulwark
Still
Civic
People
Civics

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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
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There are 3 rules to follow if you want to change (1) Start immediately, (2) Do it flamboyantly, (3) No exceptions.
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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
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Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
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The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
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What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
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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.
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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
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Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
William James