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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

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
Stronger
Soul
Surroundings

More quotes by William James

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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James
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Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
William James
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The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
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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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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So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.
William James
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...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
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
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
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From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
William James
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A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
William James
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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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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
William James
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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
William James
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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
William James
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The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.
William James
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Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.
William James
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
William James
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My experience is what I agree to attend to.
William James
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
William James