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We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.

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
Confuse
Abstraction
Data
Careful
Powerful
Use
Science
Analyse
Must
Abstractions

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If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.
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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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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
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Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.
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... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.
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Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
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Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
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How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
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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.
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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.
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Time itself comes in drops.
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