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The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet.

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
Subjects
Objects
Potentially
Pure
Virtually
Present
Instant
Either
Object
Call
Field
Times
Subject
Experience
Fields

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It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
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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!
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As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
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Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.
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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot
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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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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.
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What holds attention determines action.
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
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We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.
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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
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I have often thought the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it comes upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: This is the real me!.
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'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
William James