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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
Change
Earth
Architect
Men
Pattern
Patterns
Destiny
Creatures
Tree
Alone

More quotes by William James

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What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
William James
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
William James
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I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
William James
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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
William James
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
William James
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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
William James
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
William James
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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
William James
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James
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There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James
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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
William James
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There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
William James
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
William James
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
William James
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
William James
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
William James
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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
William James
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The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing.
William James
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
William James
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It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
William James