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Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.

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
Destiny
Determining
Higher
Voluntary
Attending
Brief
Nevertheless
Lower
Fitful
Acts
Momentous
Critical
Destinies

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So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.
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The perfection of rottenness.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to keep by force of mere inertia.
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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
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Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
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One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
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It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
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The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
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... the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
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The war-function has grasped us so far but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
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First... a new theory is attacked as absurd then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
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