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In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.

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
Order
Disprove
Crows
Crow
Assertion
Sufficient
White
Black

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To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.
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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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Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mentalfire.
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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Effort is the one strictly undervalued and original contribution we make to this world.
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
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The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful as the case may be.
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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.
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The greatest discovery of the 20th Century is that our attitude of mind determines our quality of life, not circumstances.
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A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
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In business for yourself, not by yourself.
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
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I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)
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The deepest hunger in human beings is the desire to be appreciated.
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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!
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