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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.

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
Conditions
Temperament
Possible
Superior
Individual
Superiors
Coalesce
Best
Effective
Biographical
Kind
Condition
Dictionaries
Intellect
Psychopathic
Genius
Bipolar
Gets
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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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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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
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Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
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Time itself comes in drops.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
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Religions have approved themselves they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection.
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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
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Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
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The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
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