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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

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
Thus
Happiness
Sepulchre
Natural
Infected
Seems
Surrounds
Surround
Contradiction
Breath
Breaths

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... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thingthat it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.
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Since you make evil or good by your own thoughts, it is your ruling of your thoughts which proves to be your principal concern.
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An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
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Man can change his life simply by changing his attitude.
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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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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
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...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
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All religions begin with the cry Help.
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Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life
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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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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
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If it works, it's true.
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Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
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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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Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
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The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
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