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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
Little
Passed
Many
Court
Men
Judgment
World
Philosophy
Opinion
History
Failures
Art
Appeal
Littles
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More quotes by William James

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We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
William James
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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
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Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
William James
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Act the part and you will become the part.
William James
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
William James
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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
William James
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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.
William James
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
William James
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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
William James
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If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
William James
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Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
William James
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As long as there are postmen, life will have zest.
William James
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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
William James
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If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
William James
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
William James
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Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
William James
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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.
William James
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Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
William James
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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
William James
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With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
William James