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The war-function has grasped us so far but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.

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
Interest
Imperatives
Less
Impose
Individual
Constructive
War
Hardly
Seems
Interests
Grasped
May
Burden
Lighters
Function
Lighter
Seem
Imperative

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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
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It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
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In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
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For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
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Our beliefs are really rules for action.
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Religions have approved themselves they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
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Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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It is your friends who make your world.
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
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Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man.
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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.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.
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