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

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The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
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Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
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The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
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If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
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Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.
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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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Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
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Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
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Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
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Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
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