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The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.

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
Art
Hopeless
Happens
Psychology
Feels
Profession
Thing
Conscience
Good
Teaching
Teacher
Worst
Happen
Psychologist

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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
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Religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge.
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Science can tell us what exists but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.
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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.
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Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.
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As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) isthe art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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I am only a philosopher, and there is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.
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The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.
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You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.
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Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
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Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
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Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse
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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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For the moment, what we attend to is reality.
William James