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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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
Rights
Ownership
Politics
Liberalism
Nature
Fundamental
Men
Fundamentals
Instinct
Property
Economy
Wisdom
More quotes by William James
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
I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
William James
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.
William James
Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
William James
Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.
William James
An enormous mass of experience, both of homeopathic doctors and their patients, is invoked in favor of the efficacy of these remedies and doses.
William James
We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
William James
I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.
William James
We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
William James
The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
William James
Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.
William James
Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
William James
Habit is the great flywheel of society.
William James
We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
William James
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
William James
Events are influenced by our very great desires.
William James
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
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
William James
Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
William James
You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.
William James
