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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.

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
Discovery
Circumstances
Attitude
Century
Greatest
Quality
Elderly
Mind
Determines
Life
Determine

More quotes by William James

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The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
William James
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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William James
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
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The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.
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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, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
William James
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
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Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
William James
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Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
William James
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Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
William James
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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
William James
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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
William James
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I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)
William James
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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
William James
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I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives
William James
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Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.
William James
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
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Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
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If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
William James