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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.

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
Belief
Need
Needs
Believe
Credulous
Men
Haunts
Ceased
Modern

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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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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
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Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
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New habits can be launched.
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A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
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We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct.
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The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
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I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
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In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
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Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
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