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The difference between the first and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition -- it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind -- yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

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
Things
Away
Escape
Art
Miles
Preciousness
Seems
Absolutely
Quiver
Best
Difference
Verbal
Firsts
Second
Shade
Matter
Hair
Inward
First
Differences
Definition
Kind
Point
Definitions

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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
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The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
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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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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
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Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
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The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
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I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions.
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In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.
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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
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Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.
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Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
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No decision is, in itself, a decision.
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