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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.

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
Comes
Whole
Believe
Vise
Grasps
Belief
Community

More quotes by William James

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Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
William James
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
William James
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If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
William James
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The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
William James
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
William James
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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
William James
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The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.
William James
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
William James
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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.
William James
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.
William James
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It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
William James
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
William James
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Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes
William James
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Truth is something that happens to an idea.
William James
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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
William James
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The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
William James
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
William James
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
William James
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
William James
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The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.
William James