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

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To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
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The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
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Truth is something that happens to an idea.
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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
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Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
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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.
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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
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Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
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My experience is what I agree to attend to.
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O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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A new position of responsibility will usually show a man to be a far stronger creature than was supposed.
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