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

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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
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Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes spiritualism means theaffirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.
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Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
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Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.
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Serious development of the personality begins at the closet door.
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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
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If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
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When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.
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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
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Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
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