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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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To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
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I will act as if I do make a difference.
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Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
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The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.
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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
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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 suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs
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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
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Every claim creates an obligation.
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
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We can act as if there were a God feel as if we were free consider Nature as if she were full of special designs lay plans as if we were to be immortal and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
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We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that HE was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.
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The war-function has grasped us so far but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
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