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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
Fear
Another
Form
Great
Thing
Life
Exorcise

More quotes by William James

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Better risk loss of truth than chance of error--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.
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'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
William James
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Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
William James
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We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
William James
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Evil is a disease and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.
William James
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
William James
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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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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
William James
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In the matter of belief, we are all extreme conservatives.
William James
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A thing is important if anyone think it important.
William James
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The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.
William James
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
William James