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The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.

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
Useless
Lovers
Consequence
Harmful
Loves
Obey
Must
Thinker
Even
Lover
Consequences
Impulse

More quotes by William James

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To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.
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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
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That which is most personal, is most interesting.
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
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It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
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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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Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
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Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
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Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
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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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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
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My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
William James
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
William James
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Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
William James