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It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.

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
Life
Tested
Routine
Gods
Lonely
Fail
Maxims
Failing
Emergencies
Fall
Creed
Back
Creeds

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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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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
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Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
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There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
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Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
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The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
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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.
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
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Belief creates the actual fact.
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Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
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Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
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The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.
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I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
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We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.
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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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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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