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True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.

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
Humans
Sensible
Well
Directly
Conceptual
Useful
Verbal
Lead
Intercourse
True
Flowing
Ideas
Consistency
Wells
Quarters
Human
Stability

More quotes by William James

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Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes
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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
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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.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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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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If you want a confidence, act as if you already have it. Try the as if technique.
William James
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If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
William James
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.
William James
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The difference between objective and subjective extension is one of relation to a context solely.
William James
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The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
William James
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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
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The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
William James
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History is a bath of blood.
William James
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There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker if sad, it must not scream or curse.
William James
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We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.
William James
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The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
William James
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Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.
William James
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The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands.
William James
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There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
William James
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...as I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
William James