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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
Chiefs
Undo
Waste
Extravagance
Lies
Propensity
Difference
Brutes
Differences
Subjective
Prune
Lying
Sober
Propensities
Men
Excess
Exuberant
Chief
Prunes
More quotes by William James
The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
William James
Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
William James
Real servants don't try to use God for their purposes. They let God use them for His purposes.
William James
... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.
William James
To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
William James
Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
William James
First... a new theory is attacked as absurd then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.
William James
There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.
William James
All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
William James
I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William James
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
William James
A good hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not prolific enough.
William James
Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
William James
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
William James
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
William James
My experience is what I agree to attend to.
William James
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
Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience they will lead him nowhere or else make false connections
William James
The word 'cause' is an altar to an unknown god.
William James
