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An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true

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
Order
Reality
Truth
Must
Perceptual
Conceptual
Conform
Experience
True

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It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.
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Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
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If you want to change your life, do it flamboyantly and start immediately.
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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
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The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly.
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The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself to prompt new questions in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
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I will act as if I do make a difference.
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The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
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The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
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Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual life of maturity.
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The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.
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We and God have business with each other, and in opening ourselves to God's influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.
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Habit is the great flywheel of society.
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Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
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To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
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There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
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All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.
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