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All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

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
Unknown
Gods
Scientific
Ideals
Philosophic
Altars

More quotes by William James

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Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
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An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations and, second, on their number.
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It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
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The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
William James
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Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
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I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
William James
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Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
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From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
William James
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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
William James
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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.
William James
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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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If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.
William James
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Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.
William James
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Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
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Evil is a disease and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
William James