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Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exorcise.

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
Great
Thing
Life
Exorcise
Fear
Another
Form

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The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
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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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Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
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Our life is always deeper than we know, is always more divine than it seems, and hence we are able to survive degradations and despairs which otherwise must engulf us.
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
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As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
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Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.
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The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
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There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.
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I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.
William James
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
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Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
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