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Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
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
Earth
Architect
Men
Pattern
Patterns
Destiny
Creatures
Tree
Alone
Change
More quotes by William James
To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James
The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.
William James
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
William James
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
William James
If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
William James
Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.
William James
The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
William James
What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.
William James
Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
William James
The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.
William James
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William James
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
William James
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
William James
The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
William James
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
All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.
William James
...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
William James
Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
William James
Truth happens to an idea
William James
