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The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.

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
Exist
Consciousness
Possible
Mutually
May
Split
Splits
Ignore
Total
Parts

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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
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Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
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Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
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In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.
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Strength is a facade for the proud, weakness is a mask for the lazy.
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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.
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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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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
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Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
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Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
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