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... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.

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
Philosophy
Truth
Acknowledging
Certain
Irrational
Kind
Prevent
Really
Truths
Would
Kinds
Thinking
Rule
Absolutely

More quotes by William James

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It is your friends who make your world.
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Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
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Tension is a habit. Relaxing is a habit. Bad habits can be broken, good habits formed.
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The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.
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All natural goods perish. Riches take wings fame is a breath love is a cheat youth and health and pleasure vanish.
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A winner's attitude: it may be difficult, but it's possible. A loser's attitude: It may be possible, but it's too difficult.
William James
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As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird 's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.
William James
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A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new.
William James
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If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
William James
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There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.
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I wished by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her become one.
William James
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Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
William James
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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.
William James
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Why may we not be in the universe, as our dogs and cats are in our drawingrooms and libraries?
William James
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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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Truth happens to an idea
William James
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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
William James
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.
William James