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Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.

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
Human
Walked
Humans
Invention
Legs
Using
Term
Call
Broadly
Race
Historically
Two
Imitation

More quotes by William James

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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
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Most men's friendships are too inarticulate.
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Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
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A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
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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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Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.
William James
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The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
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From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
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Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
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The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.
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To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
William James
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Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
William James
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If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
William James