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Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact...The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.

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
Fact
Sea
Individual
Remains
Facts
Accept
Mother
Lies
Mystical
Around
Accepting
Fountain
Head
Divinity
Lying
Religions
Society
Experiences

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A thing is important if anyone think it important.
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
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A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new.
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The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
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Truth happens to an idea
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
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Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.
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But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
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Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.
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The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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There is no being capable of a spiritual life who does not have within him a jungle. Where the wolf constantly HOWLS and the OBSCENE bird of night chatters endlessly.
William James