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

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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
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If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
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The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.
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Most men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits.
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Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
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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.
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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.
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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
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Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation.
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Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
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Effort is a measure of a Man.
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
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Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
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Truth is something that happens to an idea.
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An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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