Quote

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.

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
Science
Description
Beethoven
Exhaustively
May
Application
Violin
Applicability
Different
Entirely
String
Precludes
Way
Cat
Tails
Quartet
Horse
Described
Scraping
Terms
Horses
Quartets
Truly
Cats
Bowels
Term
Strings
Simultaneous

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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
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It seems the natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk.
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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
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The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
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What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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New habits can be launched.
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But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
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Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
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To change one's life: a. Start immediately b. B. Do it flamboyantly c. No exceptions Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted.
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Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
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