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

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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
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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.
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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
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... the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.
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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
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Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
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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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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
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The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
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We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
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The perfection of rottenness.
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
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In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
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You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
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Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
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The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out.
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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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