Quote

So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.

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
Ends
Replace
Feel
Anticipation
Feels
Likely
Fit
Brave
Courage
Use
Fear

More quotes by William James

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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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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
William James
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We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
William James
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
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When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.
William James
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The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
William James
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
William James
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
William James
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
William James
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
William James
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If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
William James
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
William James
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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
William James
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
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Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
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An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete... Its motor consequences are what clinch it.
William James
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
William James
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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
William James
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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
William James
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The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
William James