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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

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
Reality
Realities
Ideas
Concrete
Must
Frustration
Abstract
Endless
Agree
Inconsistency
Principles
Penalty
Facts
Penalties

More quotes by 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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I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
William James
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...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
William James
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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
William James
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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
William James
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If you can change your mind, you can change your life.
William James
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
William James
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Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
William James
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
William James
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We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.
William James
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No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.
William James
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.
William James
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Act the part and you will become the part.
William James
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Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.
William James
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The education of attention would be an education par excellence
William James
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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
William James
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
William James
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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
William James
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The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind
William James
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Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
William James