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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.

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
Roots
Sea
Darkness
Tree
Underground
Lives
Forest
Also
Islands
Like
Forests
Trees

More quotes by William James

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A man of sense is never discouraged by difficulties he redoubles his industry and his diligence, he perseveres and infallibly prevails at last.
William James
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A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
William James
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
William James
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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
William James
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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
William James
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
William James
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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.
William James
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
William James
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As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
William James
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
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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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
William James
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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
William James
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I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
William James
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
William James
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Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
William James
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With no attempt there can be no failure with no failure no humiliation.
William James
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
William James
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
William James