Quote

Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.

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
Time
Thrill
Habits
Excitement
Indeed
Habit
Excitements
Lives
Immemorial
War
Supremely
Men
Thrilling

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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
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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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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
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A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
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The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind
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Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.
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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.
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Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.
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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
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There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker if sad, it must not scream or curse.
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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
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The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees.
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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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.
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
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It is art that makes life, and I know of no substitute whatsoever for the force and beauty of its process.
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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.
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