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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.

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
Kill
Time
Suicide
Murder

More quotes by William James

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If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
William James
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses power of various sorts which he habitually fails to use.
William James
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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
William James
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
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Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
William James
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'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
William James
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Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.
William James
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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
William James
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We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
William James
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I will act as if I do make a difference.
William James
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The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
William James
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I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.
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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Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.
William James
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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!
William James
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So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
William James
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Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
William James
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
William James
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
William James
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If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
William James