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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.

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
Poor
Reason
Without
Enough
Makeshift
Impulse

More quotes by William James

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I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.
William James
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The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
William James
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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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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
William James
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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.
William James
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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
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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The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
William James
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What holds attention determines action.
William James
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I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
William James
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In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.
William James
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An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
William James
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
William James
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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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Men's activities are occupied into ways -- in grappling with external circumstances and in striving to set things at one in their own topsy-turvy mind.
William James
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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
William James
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
William James
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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
William James
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Science can tell us what exists but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
William James
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To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
William James