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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.

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
Christian
Saint
Stoic
Universe
Passionate
Resignation
Makes
Emotional
Accepts
Way
Difference
Saints
Accepting
Tremendous
Differences
Practicals
Happiness
Practical
Whether
Necessity
Drab

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To change one's life: a. Start immediately b. B. Do it flamboyantly c. No exceptions Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted.
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There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
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We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct.
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
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If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
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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.
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There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
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Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
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New habits can be launched.
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...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
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I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
William James
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The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.
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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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