Quote

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.

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
Darkness
Everlasting
Excites
Chance
Remind
Civics
Looker
Interest
Celebrate
Grim
Snatching
Death
Powers
Statues
Anon
Light
Romance
Monument
Romances
Ever
Interests
Bare
Jaws
Life
Victory
Heroism
Monuments
Battle
Reduced
Civic

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Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
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As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
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General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
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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.
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My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
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Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
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To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides
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In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
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True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
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The word 'cause' is an altar to an unknown god.
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So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.
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Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
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No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
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