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Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.

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
First
Gains
Every
Habit
Prompting
Make
Emotional
Seize
Possible
Aspire
Opportunity
Resolution
Experience
Habits
May
Gain
Firsts
Direction

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We want all our friends to tell us our bad qualities it is only the particular ass that does so whom we can't tolerate.
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With no attempt there can be no failure with no failure no humiliation.
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You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.
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Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.
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Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.
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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity.
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Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens outthe widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread', as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage.
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The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
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Man alone of all the creatures of earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his own destiny.
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If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important. . . . It is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially when a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.
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Tell him to live by yes and no - yes to everything good, no to everything bad.
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Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
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The sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
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What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
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In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
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Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.
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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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The good we do today becomes the happiness of tomorrow.
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... if we take the universe of 'fitting,' countless coats 'fit' backs, and countless boots 'fit' feet, on which they are not practically fitted countless stones 'fit' gaps in walls into which no one seeks to fit them actually. In the same way countless opinions 'fit' realities, and countless truths are valid, tho no thinker ever thinks them.
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