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What holds attention determines action.

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
Determines
Holds
Determine
Attention
Action

More quotes by William James

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... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the Earth had those experiences.
William James
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The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of training that take place there and the first-rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence.
William James
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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
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From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.
William James
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Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
William James
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Deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.
William James
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Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
William James
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But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion.
William James
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
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Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis.
William James
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Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university.
William James
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Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.
William James
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
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So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.
William James
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To know one thing thoroughly would be to know the universe.
William James
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...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.
William James
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Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
William James
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In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.
William James
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From a pragmatic point of view, the difference between living against a background of foreigness (an indifferent Universe) and one of intimacy (a benevolent Universe) means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.
William James
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
William James