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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.

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
Hear
Lying
Truth
Crocodiles
Magnanimity
Persuasion
Misunderstood
Statistics
Worse

More quotes by William James

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A thing is important if anyone think it important.
William James
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
William James
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Our beliefs are really rules for action.
William James
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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
William James
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The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
William James
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From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.
William James
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No decision is, in itself, a decision.
William James
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
William James
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If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
William James
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To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
William James
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You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
William James
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Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
William James
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If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
William James
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Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
William James
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The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.
William James
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The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
William James
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Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
William James
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
William James
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I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.
William James
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
William James