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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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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Course
Though
Water
Burn
May
Sticks
Real
Necessarily
Even
Mental
Fire
Courses

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Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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Wisdom is learning what to overlook.
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Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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Pragmatism asks its usual question. Grant an idea or belief to be true, it says, what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
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We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
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Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.
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He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.
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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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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
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Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.
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Truth is what will be steadily borne out by subsequent experience
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The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.
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I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
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I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
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There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
William James