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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.

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
Proud
Fend
Wealth
Murmur
Nations
Conquering
May
Subjection
Persons
Belonging
Without
Conquer
Men
Lays
Nation

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We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
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To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is.
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A man of sense is never discouraged by difficulties he redoubles his industry and his diligence, he perseveres and infallibly prevails at last.
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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
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In its broadest term, religion says that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it.
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So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
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The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.
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When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.
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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.
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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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The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing.
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New habits can be launched.
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The essence of genius is to know what to overlook.
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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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There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker if sad, it must not scream or curse.
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If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.
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Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
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Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.
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The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
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To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly.
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