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No decision is, in itself, a decision.

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
Decision

More quotes by William James

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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.
William James
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If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
William James
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
William James
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The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
William James
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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
William James
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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.
William James
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How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.
William James
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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
William James
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.
William James
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I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
William James
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Belief creates the actual fact.
William James
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Science can tell us what exists but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
William James
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
William James
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
William James
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Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
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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The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
William James
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Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.
William James
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All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
William James