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

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Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection.
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Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.
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The emotions aren't always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.
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Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.
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Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.
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Individuality is founded in feeling
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The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
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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
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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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We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition
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Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
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When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
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Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
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All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
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Choose a self and stand by it.
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Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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To be fertile in hypotheses is the first perquisite of creativity and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next.
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