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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
Men
Originally
Life
Wholly
Consists
Intellectual
Almost
Comes
Perceptual
Experience
Substitution
Order
Conceptual

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From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.
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A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
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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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There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.
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It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
William James
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Truth in our ideas means their power to work.
William James
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Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre. This is why as a pragmatistI have so carefully posited 'reality' ab initio, and why throughout my whole discussion, I remain an epistemologist realist.
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
William James
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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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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
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It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.
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There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.
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Theory must mediate between all previous truths and certain new experiences
William James
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Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.
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A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
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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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To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else's type of thinking.
William James
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'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth
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We all have a lifelong habit of inferiority to our full self...
William James