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If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.

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
Truth
Claim
Ever
Reasonable
Much
Claims
Men
Within
Love
Moment
Hope
Probability
Given
Grasp
Moments
Statistics

More quotes by William James

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Our minds thus grow in spots and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in it stains the ancient mass but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.
William James
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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
William James
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
William James
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All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
William James
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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.
William James
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If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
William James
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The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
William James
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
William James
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Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
William James
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...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
William James
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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
William James
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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
William James
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
William James
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
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Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
William James
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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
William James
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Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
William James
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A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
William James
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How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?
William James
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You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
William James