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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
Dictionary

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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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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
William James
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Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
William James
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It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
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The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.
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A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
William James
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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
William James
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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
William James
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.
William James