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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.

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
Good
Relaxing
Formed
Habits
Tension
Habit
Broken
Funny

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To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
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I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
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A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
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The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
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It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
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The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
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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.
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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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.
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A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
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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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Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
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I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
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Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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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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From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.
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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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