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Truth happens to an idea

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
Idea
Happens
Truth
Ideas

More quotes by William James

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Lay plans as if we were to be immortal.
William James
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Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
William James
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The man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.
William James
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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
William James
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract
William James
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Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.
William James
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So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.
William James
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The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
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Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.
William James
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Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
William James
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.
William James
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Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
William James
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Act the part and you will become the part.
William James
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Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
William James
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The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
William James
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Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.
William James
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We are mere bundles of habits.
William James
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In business for yourself, not by yourself.
William James
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Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
William James