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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive.

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
Feels
Deeply
Mental
Seek
Attitude
Particular
Vitally
Alive
Attribute
Makes
Authenticity
Feel
Attributes

More quotes by William James

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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
William James
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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.
William James
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Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa!
William James
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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
William James
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Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
William James
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
William James
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New habits can be launched.
William James
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
William James
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
William James
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Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man.
William James
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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
William James
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
William James
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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
William James
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
William James
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
William James
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Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
William James