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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.

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
Human
Humans
Appreciated
Deepest
Hunger
Friendship
Beings
Desire

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A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
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Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.
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Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
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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
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
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All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
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If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
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We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
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An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
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Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
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In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.
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When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
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The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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