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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.

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
Truth
Dictates
Mean
Inspires
Conduct
Test
Tests
Inspire
Ultimate
Means

More quotes by William James

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The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.
William James
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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
William James
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If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
William James
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
William James
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If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.
William James
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[Pragmatism's] only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted.
William James
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, never to be undone.
William James
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Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
William James
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Truth in our ideas means their power to work.
William James
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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
William James
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon 's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.
William James
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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.
William James
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
William James
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
William James
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We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.
William James
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
William James
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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
William James
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
William James
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The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.
William James
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The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
William James