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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
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Principles

More quotes by William James

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The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
William James
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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
William James
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
William James
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But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
William James
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To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
William James
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The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.
William James
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone until those smiling possibilities are dead... By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities.
William James
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You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
William James
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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system
William James
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
William James
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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
William James
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
William James
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
William James
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Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mentalfire.
William James
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
William James
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Formula to live your dream: 1. Be bold. 2. Begin now, 3. No exceptions.
William James
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Our acts of voluntary attending, as brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies.
William James
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
William James
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The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
William James
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Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James