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Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.

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
Waste
Extravagance
Lies
Propensity
Difference
Brutes
Differences
Subjective
Prune
Lying
Sober
Propensities
Men
Excess
Exuberant
Chief
Prunes
Chiefs
Undo

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'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
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All religions begin with the cry Help.
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Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
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We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
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It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.
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The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
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There is but one indefectibly certain truth , and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.
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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
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In my individual heart I fully believe my faith is as robust as yours. The trouble with your robust and full bodied faiths, however, is, that they begin to cut each others throats too soon, and for getting on in the world and establishing a modus vivendi these pestilential refinements and reasonablenesses and moderations have to creep in.
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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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Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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Habit is a second nature, or rather, it is 'ten times nature'.
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
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What a teacher needs to know about psychology might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.
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A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.
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