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Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

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
Mere
Perversity
Says
Diminishes
Running
Unites
Men
Expands
Sobriety
Drunkenness
Diminish
Alcohol
Discriminates

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Act the part and you will become the part.
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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.
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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
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The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
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Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
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If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
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Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to keep by force of mere inertia.
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The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.
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General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
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To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
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