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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.

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
Imitative
Ness
Exclusively
Virtue
Almost
Fact
Facts

More quotes by William James

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From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.
William James
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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
William James
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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
William James
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
William James
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A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
William James
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Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.
William James
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So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.
William James
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
William James
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
William James
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Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
William James
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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James
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To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
William James
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James
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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.
William James
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What a teacher needs to know about psychology might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.
William James
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Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it.
William James
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Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
William James
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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
William James
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Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
William James