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Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.
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
Believe
Measured
Necessarily
Since
Belief
Religion
Action
True
Forbids
Also
Theism
More quotes by William James
You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.
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There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
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The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.
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Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
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The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
William James
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James
There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
William James
There is an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise.
William James
Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
William James
[T]here is very little difference between one person and another, but what little difference ther eis, is very important.
William James
We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
William James
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
William James
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
Our theories are wedged and controlled as nothing else is. Yet sometimes alternative theoretic formulas are equally compatible with all the truths we know, and then we choose between them for subjective reasons. We choose the kind of theory to which we are already partial: we follow 'elegenace' or 'economy'
William James
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
William James
It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
William James
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
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
Smitten as we are with the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential element of largeness.
William James
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
William James
