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The word 'cause' is an altar to an unknown god.

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
Altar
Altars
Unknown
Cause
Causes
Word

More quotes by William James

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If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.
William James
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Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
William James
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
William James
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Knowledge about life is one thing effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.
William James
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A thing is important if anyone think it important.
William James
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The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time
William James
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Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
William James
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Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
William James
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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
William James
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Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
William James
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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
William James
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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
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The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.
William James
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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
William James
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Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
William James
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The education of attention would be an education par excellence
William James
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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
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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Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.
William James
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There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
William James