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Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?

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
Play
Ideals
Planet
Planets
Moonlit
Evidence
Certitude
Fine
Doubtless
Science
Visited
Found
Objective
Dream
Objectives

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Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
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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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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
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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.
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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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Effort is a measure of a Man.
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Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
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All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.
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