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We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.

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
Sight
Favorably
Animal
Gregarious
Society
Propensity
Kind
Liking
Innate
Noticed
Fellows
Animals

More quotes by William James

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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
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It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
William James
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
William James
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
William James
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
William James
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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
William James
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How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?
William James
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
William James
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We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.
William James
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How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.
William James
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We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
William James
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The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.
William James