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True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot

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
Verify
False
True
Cannot
Truth
Ideas
Validate
Assimilate

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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
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The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.
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Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
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If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
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An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.
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All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
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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.
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You can alter your life by altering the state of your mind.
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Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.
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The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.
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The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.
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Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides
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To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
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Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power.
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If theological ideas prove to have a value for concrete life, they will be true, for pragmatism, in the sense of being good for so much. How much more they are true, will depend entirely on their relations to the other truths that also have to be acknowledged.
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You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.
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The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, words, words, words, must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.
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