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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

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
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Law
Language
Process
Antecedent
Truth
Animate
Abstract
Principles

More quotes by William James

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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
William James
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Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.
William James
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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
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As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance to celebrate!
William James
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For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
William James
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
William James
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To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
William James
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The power to move the world is in the subconcious mind
William James
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True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
William James
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The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.
William James
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Act the part and you will become the part.
William James
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
William James
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Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.
William James
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There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
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 can act as if there were a God feel as if we were free consider Nature as if she were full of special designs lay plans as if we were to be immortal and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
William James
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Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
William James
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The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
William James
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You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.
William James
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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
William James