Quote

Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

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
Gone
Grasp
Moment
Notice
Moments
Instant
Baffling
Trying
Experiences
Melted
Time
Touch
Fled
Becoming
Arrest
Present
Attend
Anyone
Occurs

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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot
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The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
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A thing is important if anyone think it important.
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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
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Truth in our ideas means their power to work.
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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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Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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You may not get everything you dream about, but you will never get anything you don't dream about.
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The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
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