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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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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
Consists
Intellectual
Almost
Comes
Perceptual
Experience
Substitution
Order
Conceptual
Men
Originally
Life
Wholly

More quotes by William James

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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.
William James
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It is as important to cultivate your silence power as your word power.
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Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
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You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.
William James
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We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
William James
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I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.
William James
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Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes
William James
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What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise.
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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Every claim creates an obligation.
William James
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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
William James
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A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock
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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Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
William James
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Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.
William James
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When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion, action will.
William James
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Faith branches off the highroad before reason begins
William James
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Give your dreams all you've got, and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you.
William James
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To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.
William James