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The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.

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
Simplest
Deepened
Significance
Sweeps
Seem
Maxim
Natural
Maxims
Experience
Formula
Sense
Mystical
Seems
Formulas
Would
Occasionally

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It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
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a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendships and intimacies … and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to keep by force of mere inertia.
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
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In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.
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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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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
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I will act as if I do make a difference.
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It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can...in the acquisition of a new habit, we must take car to launch ourselves with as strong and decided initiative as possible. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.
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I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives
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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
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