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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein

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
Dogmatize
Hypotheses
Hypothesis
Surely
Consider
Truth
Better
Always

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We can act as if there were a God feel as if we were free consider Nature as if she were full of special designs lay plans as if we were to be immortal and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
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Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
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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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Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one
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Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.
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The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
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An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: There is very little difference between one man and another but what little there is, is very important. This distinction seems to me to go to the root of the matter.
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The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
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If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
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It is so human a book that I don't see how belief in its divine authority can survive the reading of it.
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Procrastination is attitude's natural assassin. There's nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task
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Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.
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Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
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Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.
William James
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
William James
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Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.
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Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
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The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.
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