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Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.

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
Sustained
Commonly
Believed
Genius
Attention
Making
Attentive
Power
Excel
Men
Geniuses

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The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
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I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.
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Experience, as we know, has a way of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.
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All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.
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As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them.
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.
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Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves.
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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
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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.
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If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
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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.
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If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!
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My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
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Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
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The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
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We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.
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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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