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The true'to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.

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
Expedient
Briefly
Behaving
True
Right
Way
Thinking

More quotes by William James

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In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
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If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
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An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
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No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
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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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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
William James
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
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Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa!
William James
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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.
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.
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Touch is the alpha and omega of affection.
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
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How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
William James
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
William James
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James
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To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous.
William James