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Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.

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
Activity
Habit
Automatic
Hundred
Habitual
Morning
Purely
Lying
Ninety
Night
Possibly
Rising
Nine

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I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
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To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
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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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No decision is, in itself, a decision.
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Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
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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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Act the part and you will become the part.
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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
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The subjectivist in morals, when his moral feelings are at war with the facts about him, is always free to seek harmony by toningdown the sensitiveness of the feelings.
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There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
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Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
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