Quote

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

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
Voluntarily
Judgment
Wandering
Education
Root
Attention
Faculty
Character
Bringing
Back
Wander
Would
Improve
Excellence

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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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If it works, it's true.
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
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Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
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Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation.
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.
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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 strenuous life tastes better
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
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All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride.
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