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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.

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
Broken
Reality
Never
Reconstruct
Wholeness
Concepts

More quotes by William James

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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
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
William James
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
William James
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Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
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We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
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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An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
William James
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The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
William James
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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
William James
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Individuality is founded in feeling and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
William James
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The stream of thought flows on but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
William James
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Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force... They draw us on and energize us, give us courage and will to take on important initiatives. Negative images of the future also have a magnetism. They pull the spirit downward in the path of despair.
William James
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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.
William James
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We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.
William James
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When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.
William James
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If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James
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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
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Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
William James
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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
William James