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

More quotes by William James

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Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
William James
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Every claim creates an obligation.
William James
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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.
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Agisci come se quel che fai, facesse la differenza. La fa!
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You do not sing because you're happy, you're happy because you sing.
William James
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The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse.
William James
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There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
William James
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The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
William James
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a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries
William James
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Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
William James
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Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul None is more gladdening or fruitful than to know You can regenerate and make yourself what you will.
William James
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The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.
William James
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
William James
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The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.
William James
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Man lives for science as well as bread.
William James
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Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.
William James
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
William James
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To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatize ins blaue hinein
William James
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To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction
William James
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Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.
William James