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Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.

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
Life
Essence
Incidental
Intellectual
Adolescent
Normal
Wider
Small
Conversion
Child
Passage
Spiritual
Passages
Universe
Maturity
Children
Phenomenon

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All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
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If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
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I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
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On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.
William James
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
William James
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We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
William James
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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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We can change our circumstances by a mere change of our attitude.
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All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride.
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We are mere bundles of habits.
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
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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.
William James
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Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.
William James
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What a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Everything about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.... Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it.
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The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.
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You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
William James
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No decision is, in itself, a decision.
William James
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Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
William James