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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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Belief creates the actual fact.
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Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
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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.
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
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What a teacher needs to know about psychology might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.
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The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of training that take place there and the first-rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence.
William James
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
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A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
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Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
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Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
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To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.
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Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
William James
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If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
William James