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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.

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
Reduce
Complexity
Aim
Simplicity
Science
Always

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How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?
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If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.
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As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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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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Man lives for science as well as bread.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.
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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
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The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
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Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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