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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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Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
William James
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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
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Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.
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If you want a confidence, act as if you already have it. Try the as if technique.
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
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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
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
William James
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The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
William James
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I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
William James
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Religions have approved themselves they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
William James
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Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitement's of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.
William James
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One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.
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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
William James
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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
William James
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Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.
William James
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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.
William James
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The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
William James
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
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True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.
William James