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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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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
William James
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In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.
William James
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All religions begin with the cry Help.
William James
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
William James
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There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
William James
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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
William James
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Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
William James
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James
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How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.
William James
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
William James
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
William James
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The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.
William James
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On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
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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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
William James
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For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
William James
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In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
William James
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
William James
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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.
William James
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Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
William James