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A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.

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
Great
Dreamed
Never
Achieve
Men
Anything
May
Firsts
Everything
Without
First

More quotes by William James

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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.
William James
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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
William James
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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
William James
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
William James
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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
William James
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Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
William James
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Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
William James
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Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
William James
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The strenuous life tastes better
William James
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Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don't want to do
William James
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Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
William James
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In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.
William James
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
William James
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
William James
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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
William James
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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
William James
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Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.
William James
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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.
William James
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
William James