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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
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
Follow
Becoming
Focus
Pile
Great
Wood
Increasing
Heat
Woods
Service
More quotes by William James
The stream of thought flows on but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
William James
The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
There must always be a discrepncy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing
William James
Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life
William James
Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
William James
Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
William James
Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
William James
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.
William James
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
William James
Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
William James
Man lives for science as well as bread.
William James
The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
William James
We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
William James
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
William James
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
William James
Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
William James
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
William James
Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
William James
Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
William James
