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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.

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
Opinion
History
Failures
Art
Appeal
Littles
Appeals
Little
Passed
Many
Court
Men
Judgment
World
Philosophy

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The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
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The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
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Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions.
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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
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Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are sure to float up of their own accord from a long enough daily work at a given matter.
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The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
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From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology.
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A man may not achieve everything he has dreamed, but he will never achieve anything great without having dreamed it first.
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
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Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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To some of us the thought of God is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
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I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.
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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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Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
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Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
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The only function that one experience can perform is to lead into another experience and the only fulfillment we can speak of isthe reaching of a certain experienced end. When one experience leads to (or can lead to) the same end as another, they agree in function.
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
William James