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The exercise of prayer, in those who habitually exert it, must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves.

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
Adequate
Nerves
Doctors
Exercise
Normal
Habitually
Prayer
Exert
Must
Mind
Regarded

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We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
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True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
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New habits can be launched.
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
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A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
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We must not just patch and tinker with life. We must keep renewing it. Embrace novelty and uniqueness.
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If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
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O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
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... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.
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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
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If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.
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For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
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