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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
Complexity
Aim
Simplicity
Science
Always
Reduce

More quotes by William James

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The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
William James
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If it works, it's true.
William James
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
William James
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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.
William James
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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
William James
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
William James
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All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
William James
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Focus on increasing service. Becoming great where you are. Pile in the wood. The heat will follow.
William James
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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.
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.
William James
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
William James
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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.
William James
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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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Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.
William James
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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
William James
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Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa!
William James
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Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain.
William James
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James
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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
William James