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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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Instinct leads, logic does but follow.
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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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It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.
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Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.
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All of our life is but a mass of small habits - practical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - that bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.
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Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where lesser men see none.
William James
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Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.
William James
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The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
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At bottom, the whole concern of religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe.
William James
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For morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers.
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Religions have approved themselves they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.
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Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way.
William James
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Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed. which give happiness. Thomas Jefferson We never enjoy perfect happiness our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.
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.
William James
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It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
William James
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If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
William James
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To be conscious means not simply to be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that being.
William James
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
William James
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The truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, words, words, words, must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn.
William James