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Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.

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
Well
Respect
Gains
Believe
Mistake
Mistakes
Practice
Using
Clear
Method
Makes
Confidence
Saves
Art
Soon
Psychology
Back
Teaching
Wells
Theory
Gain

More quotes by William James

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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
William James
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Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought.
William James
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A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.
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It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.
William James
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We with our lives are like islands in the sea... The islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
William James
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
William James
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
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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When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
William James
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The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.
William James
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Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
William James
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The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
William James
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I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.
William James
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
William James
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Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.
William James
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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
William James
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We are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
William James
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible ... faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.
William James
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Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction
William James
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Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.
William James