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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins

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
Branches
Begins
Faith
Political
Reason

More quotes by William James

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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
William James
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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.
William James
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
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There is a voice inside which speaks and says, This is the real me!
William James
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Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
William James
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
William James
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Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James
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But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
William James
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New habits can be launched.
William James
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The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.
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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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
William James
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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
William James
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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs
William James
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
William James
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
William James
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So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
William James