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I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives

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
Long
Lives
Believe
True
Truth
Profitable
Seems
Odd
Ideas
Aware
Wells
Seem
Well
Hear
Must
Idea

More quotes by William James

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The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.
William James
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
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Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.
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Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
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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Act the part and you will become the part.
William James
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Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
William James
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
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As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them.
William James
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
William James
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The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.
William James
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
William James
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[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
William James
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
William James
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Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William James
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At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.
William James
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Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith.
William James
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
William James