Quote

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

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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
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I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
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We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
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You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
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The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
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Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
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Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
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Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
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Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
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Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
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Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
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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.
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The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
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Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
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