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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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
Internet
Give
Giving
Ratified
Pretensions
Pretension
Deception
Relief
Blessed
More quotes by William James
When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
William James
It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
William James
Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
Truth happens to an idea
William James
A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new.
William James
We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
William James
The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
William James
To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
William James
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
William James
Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
William James
All religions begin with the cry Help.
William James
We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
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.
William James
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.
William James
Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
William James
We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.
William James
It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
William James
We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
William James
So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
William James
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James