Quote

The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.

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
System
Complexes
Study
Grown
Shows
Complex
Steering
Might
Nervous
Regulate
Sake
Organ
Expect
Distribution
Exactly
Added
Consciousness
Organs

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The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.
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It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.
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Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
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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.
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
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A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
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To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
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Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
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If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.
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In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.
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Time itself comes in drops.
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All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
William James