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

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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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Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.
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If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door.
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Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
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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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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
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The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.
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From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
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If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
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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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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
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It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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