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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.

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
Word
Success
Squalid
Cash
Interpretation
National
Disease

More quotes by William James

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So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.
William James
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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
William James
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
William James
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So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.
William James
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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
William James
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An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete... Its motor consequences are what clinch it.
William James
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Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
William James
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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
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The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
William James
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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
William James
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Great indeed is Fear but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.
William James
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Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
William James
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What a teacher needs to know about psychology might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.
William James
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
William James
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The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance,' or its congruity with our residual beliefs
William James
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It is not probable that the reader will be satisfied with any of these solutions, and contemporary philosophers, even rationalistically minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no one has intelligibly banished the mystery of fact.
William James
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
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[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.
William James
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Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
William James
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The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
William James