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The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption.

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
Loses
Cowardice
Desire
Chief
Fear
Chiefs
Corruption
Gain
Gains
Wealth
Lose
Breeders

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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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Everything which is demanded is by that fact a good.
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Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.
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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.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.
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As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.
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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 do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.
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Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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The general law is that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.
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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.
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The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.
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It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.
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Act the part and you will become the part.
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It is your friends who make your world.
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Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
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Choose a self and stand by it.
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