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Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system

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
Truth
Part
Credit
System
Fact
Lives
Facts

More quotes by William James

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The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.
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.
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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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
William James
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'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
William James
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There is a voice inside which speaks and says, This is the real me!
William James
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We are mere bundles of habits.
William James
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Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
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We have nothing to do but to receive, resting absolutely upon the merit, power, and love of our Redeemer.
William James
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There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
William James
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James
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The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.
William James
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All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
William James
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Truth happens to an idea
William James
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Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.
William James
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We need only in cold blood to act as if the thing in question were real and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.
William James
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The squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.
William James
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Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. which give happiness. Thomas Jefferson We never enjoy perfect happiness our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.
William James
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
William James
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Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy of fully to match it [to] the peculiar systems that he knows.
William James