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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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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Shall
Religion
Individual
Feelings
Mean
Individuality
Men
Acts
Solitude
Experiences

More quotes by William James

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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein.
William James
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Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.
William James
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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
William James
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A thing is important if anyone think it important.
William James
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
William James
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To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.
William James
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
William James
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
William James
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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
William James
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Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
William James
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From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.
William James
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The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.
William James
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
William James
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
William James
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What holds attention determines action.
William James
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Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
William James
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
William James
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No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
William James
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The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
William James