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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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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Must
Result
Really
Certainly
Things
Hundred
Time
Results
Almost
Incompatible
Wish
Exclusively
Care
Attain
Enough
Strongly

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Our beliefs are really rules for action.
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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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Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
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The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
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[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.
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Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all.
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'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
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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.
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
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Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
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Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
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In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
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We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
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a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries
William James