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The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.

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
Like
Infallible
Instincts
Pope
Reflection
Instinct
Among
Greatest
Dogmatize
Left
Popes

More quotes by William James

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If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
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Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
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In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly.
William James
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The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.
William James
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So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.
William James
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The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.
William James
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All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride.
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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To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.
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Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
William James
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
William James
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
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
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
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... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.
William James
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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.
William James
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
William James