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Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.

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
Mystery
Moods
State
Fidelity
Understand
Ancestor
Power
Marvelous
States
Affection
May
Mood
Remotest
Mental
Unsolved
Dog
Deathless

More quotes by William James

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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.
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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.
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Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
William James
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
William James
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Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
William James
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To neglect the wise sayings of great thinkers is to deny ourselves the truest education.
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What a teacher needs to know about psychology might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.
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The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
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.
William James
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
William James
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
William James
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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
William James
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If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
William James
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We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.
William James
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An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations and, second, on their number.
William James
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
William James
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As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them.
William James